For the First Time, You Get to Choose Where the Millennium Falcon Flies

Tomorrow, May 22, the most famous ship in the galaxy gets the biggest change it has seen since it first opened its boarding ramp — and for once, the flight crew gets a say in where it goes.

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at both Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort is launching an entirely new mission, and according to the Disney Experiences team behind the rebuild, this is no cosmetic refresh. The attraction has been rebuilt from the inside out — new story, new destinations, new technology — timed to arrive the same day Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu hits theaters.

A New Mission, Not a New Paint Job

The original Smugglers Run sent guests out to run cargo for the pirate Hondo Ohnaka, and the outcome was always more or less the same. The new experience changes that completely. Hondo is still your handler, but this time he is recruiting flight crews to join Din Djarin and Grogu on a mission to track down a group of ex-Imperial officers — and, naturally, to haul home a little valuable cargo along the way.

You Decide Where the Falcon Goes

Here is the part that genuinely matters: for the first time, the crew is in control of its own destination. Depending on how your mission unfolds, you might find the Falcon dropping into the cloud city of Bespin, picking through the wreckage of the second Death Star around the forest moon of Endor, or weaving through the towers of the city-planet Coruscant. No two flights are guaranteed to look the same.

Engineers get a new perk, too — for the first time, those positions can interact with Grogu during the mission. If that alone doesn’t move a few extra people into the standby line, nothing will.

Under the Hood: A Ground-Up Rebuild

The story is the headline, but the rebuild beneath it may prove the more lasting upgrade. Disney moved the attraction’s core systems from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5 and added new Nvidia compute hardware and graphics cards. That horsepower enables real-time environment streaming, which is the technical trick that makes the branching destinations possible in the first place.

Asa Kalama, Executive of Creative and Interactive Experiences at Walt Disney Imagineering, framed the thinking behind it this way in Disney’s feature on the update: “It’s an inherently unique medium. It’s the physical world. And so we try to lean into the things that it does best.” Rather than recreating scenes from the film beat for beat, Imagineers worked directly with director Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni — even capturing footage on the actual film set — to build a story that lives alongside the movie instead of summarizing it.

Why the Timing Matters

Launching a major ride update on the same day a film opens is no accident. Disney has been leaning hard into what it calls its “flywheel” — the idea that a story builds momentum when it plays out in theaters, in the parks, and across streaming all at once. The Mandalorian and Grogu mission is that strategy made physical.

For guests who catch the movie in the morning and head to the parks that afternoon, the ride is built to feel like the next chapter. For anyone who hasn’t seen the film yet, it’s designed to stand on its own — a trickier balance than it sounds, and one the team clearly spent real time getting right.

What It Means for Your Trip

The mission goes live at both coasts tomorrow — Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland. Lightning Lane access works the way it always has, and given the film tie-in, plan on heavier-than-usual waits for at least the first few weeks.

If your trip is later this summer, the branching structure quietly changes the math on re-rides. A ride that used to feel a bit one-and-done now has a reason to get back in line.

Kelly’s Take

Smugglers Run always had remarkable bones — the cockpit set is one of the best things Imagineering has ever built, and actually flying the Falcon is about as good as a theme park premise gets. What it never quite had was a mission worthy of all that. This sounds like the version the ride was always meant to be, and if you have a trip on the calendar, it’s the one worth strapping in for.