A new “Star Wars” movie — “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” a supersized spinoff of the streaming series on Disney+ — arrives in theaters nationwide on Friday. At the same time, on both coasts, a new “Star Wars” attraction (based, in part, on “The Mandalorian and Grogu”) will open at Disneyland, just outside of Anaheim, California, and Disney’s Hollywood Studios, part of the sprawling, once-swampy Walt Disney World complex near Orlando, Florida.
People speak in hushed tones of the synergistic power of the Walt Disney Company, and most of the time, they are perhaps assigning too much credit to its vast corporate machinations. But opening an elaborate theme park attraction and a big budget movie, which serves as the basis for that attraction, at the exact same time really is a feat that only Disney could pull off.
It’s also in lockstep with new CEO Josh D’Amaro’s comprehensive approach to running the company, dubbed “One Disney.”
“Our greatest advantage is not any one business, but how our global businesses come together,” D’Amaro said in a company-wide memo sent to staff when he succeeded Bob Iger in March. “When our teams are aligned and working in a connected way, we can build on our strengths, reach people wherever they are, and deepen their relationship with Disney.”
The synergy between a new “Star Wars” movie and a new theme park attraction also comes at a crucial time for the brand. It’s been seven years since the last “Star Wars” movie, the critically derided “Rise of Skywalker,” hit theaters. Development on various new films started and stopped in the interim, until Lucasfilm tapped Jon Favreau to bring his popular Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” to the big screen. It’s a brand diminished, as tracking has “The Mandalorian and Grogu” pegged for a box office opening in the ballpark of $85 million for four days — more on par with a mid-tier Marvel movie than the once-shining IP from a galaxy far, far away.
But if excitement from the diehard fans can be leveraged into theme park tickets for a new “Mandalorian and Grogu” attraction, suddenly the gamble is less risky. Especially if, as Disney executives boasted to TheWrap, they could rework the existing attraction with zero ride downtime. Indeed, the new overlay was installed without ever having to turn away guests from Smuggler’s Run.
“The fact that we were able to actually get it out day-and-date for the film is, in my opinion, kind of a thing,” said Matt Martin, a member of the Lucasfilm Story Group who worked on the attraction.
This is the story of an 18-month zip through the galaxy, bringing together two of the most profitable arms of the entire Disney company to super-eventize the arrival of a brand new “Star Wars” film.
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Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run opened with the rest of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, on both coasts, in 2019. One of two marquee attractions in the land, the attraction put you in control of perhaps the most famous spaceship in cinema history – once piloted by Han Solo, then Rey (in the sequel trilogy) and, for the purposes of this ride, a family of five from Minnesota. It utilized the Unreal 4 game engine to create environments on the fly and allowed guests of the parks to serve specific roles onboard the craft – pilot, gunner and mechanic.
You would have to complete tasks in order to successfully finish your mission (something to do with Coaxium, an unstable fuel source that was a major plot point in the largely forgotten “Solo: A Star Wars Story”); an earlier iteration of the land would have your exploits “follow you” as you interacted with other patrons and shopkeepers in the land. Imagine your bartender at the cantina referencing how much you’d messed up the Millennium Falcon! (This aspect of the attraction and, indeed, the land itself, has been mostly abandoned.)
Before the ride premiered, there were loose promises that the ride film itself would be swapped out every-so-often, allowing you to go on different “missions,” similar to how the new version of Star Tours, which debuted in 2011, would continually add new destinations and variations to its roster of planets and encounters. (The 2011 version of Star Tours, originally set in the prequel era, now includes bits and bobs from everything – the sequel trilogy and even Disney+ shows like “Ahsoka” and “Andor.”)
Years went by and Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run stayed the same. Until now.
This new version of Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run sees you, er, borrowing the Millennium Falcon and using it on a mission to help the Mandalorian (voiced by someone doing a killer Pedro Pascal impression). You travel to either the ruins of the second Death Star (in orbit near Endor), as seen in “The Rise of Skywalker”; the planet-wide city of Coruscant, introduced in the prequel trilogy; or Bespin aka Cloud City, made famous by “The Empire Strikes Back.” The individual roles are given more to do, including the mechanic, previously the most passive position, which gets to choose which planet you visit. And it’s nice to see Grogu on the screens inside the cabin; it gives everything much needed life.
Perhaps most crucially, Han Solo is actually represented in this version of the attraction. The earlier version was set during the sequel trilogy after — spoiler alert! — Han Solo had been killed by his son, Kylo Ren. Now, with the recent rejiggering of the Galaxy’s Edge timeline, the ride takes place shortly after the events of “Return of the Jedi,” when Han Solo is alive and well. You can now hear Han Solo (not voiced by Harrison Ford, but by a better soundalike than you can hear over at the Indiana Jones Adventure) wondering what happened to his beloved ship.
The original version of Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run was technologically advanced but emotionally uninvolving. It was hard to get roped into the adventure because everything was so abstract. Much can be said about the slightly creaky technology that powers Star Tours, which opened at Disneyland in 1987 before its 2011 refresh, but the attraction has a bigger pull because of your relationship with the robot inside of the cabin (first Rex, now C-3PO). The new “Mandalorian and Grogu” addition, based on the film co-written and directed by Favreau and co-written by Dave Filoni (now the creative bigwig at Lucasfilm) gives the ride that much-needed emotional oomph.
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According to Asa Kalama, Executive of Creative and Interactive Experiences at Walt Disney Imagineering, the arm of the company responsible for the theme parks, attractions and cruise ships, work on the new version of the attraction began 18 months ago.
“We started having conversations with Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau about where they were going with the film, what Mando and Grogu were going to be up to, and how we could think about connecting the story that guests experience in the attraction to the adventures that Mando and Grogu have on the big screen,” Kalama told TheWrap. “It all started with the story, then from there we went straight into production, upgrading new technology, developing new assets for an entirely new mission that’ll feel like an entirely new attraction.”
“Early on we had some early discussions, just between us on the Lucasfilm side and Walt Disney Imagineering, and came up with some loose concept of what it could be. Then we were able to speak directly to Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, push them on our ideas, they pitch us on a bunch of their ideas — especially Jon, because he’s such a Disney parks fan, so he had a lot of great ideas — and then it was just like, OK, now, how do we do this right?” explained Martin.
“Putting the story together was almost the easiest part, compared to all of the other things that Imagineering was able to do. There are things that you’ve never felt on that attraction before, you’ve got multiple different planets that you can go to. There’s so much more agency, every position within the cockpit has been kind of rethought a bit, so you can get a better experience than even what you had previously.”
Kalama said that this was not a recycled idea for when the initial version of the ride was meant to have different missions. “Everything is brand new, both creatively and technically – all new story, all new hardware, all new video game engine, all new adventure and mission,” he said.
The Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run team, when crafting the new experience, definitely listened to the fan feedback on what Kalama called “Mission One.” For the pilots, there is a more “even” tenor to the pitch and yaw that “guarantees a more cinematic flight, regardless of how good you are at piloting a spaceship.” The gunning experience is “even more responsive.”
“And then, for our flight engineers, there’s a ton of new experiences for them. They get to not only repair the ship, but they also get to a tractor to beam in cargo,” Kalama said. “Additionally, if they want, they have the ability to call Grogu on the little video monitor in the cockpit, and then, most critically, they have the most important job of all, which is to determine which planetary destination your adventure is going to take you.”
Kalama stressed that there are different paths within those destinations, depending on whether you go left or right, over or under. What was once a fairly linear experience has blossomed with new potential.
“From a testing perspective, it also made it a lot more challenging when you think about, like, the QA process of there are all of these different branches that you could potentially explore,” Kalama said. “We had to try every single possible branch.”
The gaming engine that powers Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run was switched from Unreal 4 to Unreal 5, which Kalama described as “a generational upgrade in terms of visual fidelity and quality,” but it also was such an extensive tech switchover that the old version of the ride cannot be swapped out interchangeably (or randomly). “Moving forward, guests will be experiencing the new adventure,” said Kalama.
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Disneyland has always had a symbiotic relationship with “Star Wars.”
On May 27, 1977, Space Mountain opened at Disneyland, just two years after it debuted at the Magic Kingdom, then the only theme park at the Walt Disney World Resort. Two days earlier, on May 25, 1977, “Star Wars” debuted in theaters. The connection – between a galaxy far, far away and a similarly thrilling space adventure much closer to home – was immediately drawn between fans and the lines for Space Mountain that first summer, which snaked all the way out of Tomorrowland and down Main Street.
A decade later, Star Tours, a collaboration between Walt Disney Imagineering and George Lucas, would open at Disneyland and the park would stay open for 60 straight hours so fans could experience the immersive simulator attraction. Of course, in the years since, the partnership between Disney and Lucas intensified, until Disney purchased Lucasfilm in 2012 and the characters really started flooding the parks, culminating in the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge in 2019.
Now, in 2026, the hope is that guests who watch “The Mandalorian and Grogu” will then go to Disneyland to take a spin with their favorite characters on the Millennium Falcon.
A ride has opened alongside the opening of a movie before; Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout welcomed its first guests across the esplanade at Disney California Adventure on May 27, 2017, the same day that “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2” arrived in theaters. The drop ride, now set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, replaced The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.
But with Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run, there’s a very important twist.
“One of the unique things about this attraction launch is it’s maybe one of the first times not only that we are launching day-and-date but without any downtime at all, so the team has worked very carefully and very diligently to be able to upgrade not only the hardware, the software, the way the experience operates, all while the attraction continues to operate,” said Kalama.
That’s right – Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run never went down, not for a single day, while they were prepping the new version of the attraction. In fact, the day we rode it, the rest of the ride was operating and still playing the old version of the attraction for non-press guests.
But if this iteration of Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run took 18 months to design and install and there’s another new “Star Wars” movie, titled “Starfighter” starring Ryan Gosling, about a year away, how far along are they on another iteration of the attraction?
Kalama quickly froze, like he had been dipped in carbonite. Then he said something.
“I mean, there’s always conversations,” Kalama said.
Martin was more democratic.
“I wouldn’t count on it for ‘Starfighter,’ because we’re so focused on this, but I do think that we’ll look for other opportunities to do stuff with ‘Starfighter.’ Then, obviously, we have an endless supply of ‘Star Wars’ for the future. I think that they’re thinking of some really cool things, so there’s going to be a lot of opportunities going forward.”
In other words: trust the Force.
