A long list of ride closures is making Disney World less fun

For generations, a visit to Walt Disney World has been a rite of passage. Kids around the country — and around the world — make the trek to sweltering Orlando. They ride It’s A Small World. They buy a Mickey Mouse ice cream bar. They take a photo with the main mouse himself. They get a respiratory virus from licking the handrails while in line for Haunted Mansion.

But the kids coming through the turnstiles this year might have a problem replicating some of the moments that make this swampland the most magical place on earth. 

Namely: a lot of Disney is closed right now.

Anywhere between one-fourth and one-third of the Walt Disney World Resort is expected to be closed this year, according to Inside the Magic, a Disney news site. And exclusive data provided to Sherwood News by Touring Plans, a service that crowdsources wait times on theme park rides to recommend personalized plans for guests, shows that the number of rides closed across Disney World at any one time this year — 13 in all — is the second-highest outside of the COVID-19 pandemic since Touring Plans began recording data in 2010, excluding one six-day spell in January 2023.

Big Thunder Mountain Railroad’s runaway rollercoaster is closed until 2026. Want to cross the water to Tom Sawyer Island, or meander on the Liberty Square Riverboat? Run — even if it’s banned in the parks — because they’ll be closing, too. Over at Epcot, Test Track is being rethemed and due to open later this summer, Spaceship Earth is rumored to be closing for maintenance shortly, and even cult favorite Gran Fiesta Tour Starring The Three Caballeros (check out the back of the Mexico pavilion for the best wait-time-to-enjoyment ratio in the entire resort) is shut through mid-March. Animal Kingdom is similarly somnolent. Only Disney’s Hollywood Studios is (relatively) unscathed.

“This is one of the largest sets of resort-wide closures probably in almost a decade,” Len Testa, president of Touring Plans, said. Testa is also the coauthor of “The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World.” What Testa finds different in this year’s experience compared to the expansion of Hollywood Studios in the mid-2010s, for example, is that by and large, Disney isn’t unveiling grand new attractions after the closure. “The pipeline ran dry,” Testa said.

“The increasing closures at Walt Disney World are largely due to costs of running certain attractions, especially things like shows that might involve live performers,” said Rebecca Williams, a theme park researcher at the University of South Wales. “It’s also a knock-on effect from the pandemic where development of the parks had to take a back seat and has led to some of that work happening at the same time due to delays.”

Disney did not respond to a request for comment.

At the same time, Disney’s competitors are starting to gear up their own offerings. Traditionally, Testa said, an Orlando vacation for most people has taken a similar form: you come for and spend the most time at Disney World, and then tack on a few days at Comcast’sUniversal, its main competitor in Florida. 

But with Universal opening a new theme park, Epic Universe, later this summer, the calculus for many tourists is changing. “The opening of Universal’s Epic Universe park in May gets talked about a lot in terms of how Disney can compete with that — and whether the perception is that Universal is innovating while Disney is standing still,” Williams said.

Disney is responding to that by making sure its parks look their best, hoping to capture that audience traveling to Orlando for Universal’s theme park unveiling. 

“I think that’s back of mind for them, to try to have things ready,” Scott Gustin, a Disney analyst and journalist, said. Gustin said that in the last decade or so, Disney has used the summer months for refurbishment as vacationers avoid the hottest, stickiest months of Florida’s climate. 

But thanks to the new competition, this summer is likely to be when the theme park is most in the spotlight, so Disney may well be frontloading its refurb work to prevent too many closures at an expected peak. 

The problem? In the short term, at least, the renovations are mostly to maintain decrepit rides and worn-looking themed areas rather than bringing anything new to offer guests. “Disney isn’t seen as expanding their parks or adding to them, but rather replacing existing attractions,” Williams explained.

Testa equates it to Ford saying it’s not developing any new vehicle models for the 2026, 2027, or 2028 calendar years. “No one would do that,” he said. “But Disney did. They only opened one ride last year, and that ride was the rebranding of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure from Splash Mountain. But in terms of actual new rides, they had nothing in 2024 and they have nothing in 2025.” 

The obvious decision would be to start construction on new rides, but that requires closing off areas of the park at a time when social media commenters have only just finished dubbing Epcot “Wallcot” because of its extensive construction walls.

Testa referenced Animal Kingdom, one of Disney’s most constrained parks when it comes to the number of rides available to guests. Disney has announced plans to close Dinosaur, one of the park’s landmark rides, and replace it with a new one in 2026. “If they closed it this year instead of next year, that means the park would only have four open attractions during the colder months of the year,” he explained. “You can’t charge full price for a park with four rides, right?”

It’s an issue even Hugh Johnston, Disney’s chief financial officer, has recognized. At a UBS conference in December, Johnston said, “We have to be smart about pricing, particularly being sensitive to the consumer who is more focused on the value end of the offering.” Johnston added that the base-level prices for Disney parks “haven’t moved up much in recent years. It’s the premium end that’s moved up.” He cited paid-for Lighting Lane line skips as one example.

Gustin said that the resort’s careworn features have been apparent in his visits. “I do think they got a little behind on what would be regular refurbishment and maintenance of rides,” he said. The problem is made worse by Disney charging more for experiences like Lightning Lane that used to be free. 

“This is a perverse incentive of Disney making $50 million a year on its ride reservation system,” Testa said. “They can’t bring down for maintenance the rides that need to be brought down for maintenance, because that would only make the problem worse.”

Testa’s own analysis of data gathered by Touring Plans users suggests that one of Disney’s big-ticket attractions, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, averages two hours of downtime a day over teething issues that have blighted the ride since its 2019 opening. “They can’t bring that ride down for the multi-month maintenance that it needs to fix that problem, because whoever decides to do that blows a $25 million hole in their revenue projections for the year, and nobody who’s running that park is going to take that hit voluntarily.”

“When you’re running a park that never closes, you can’t take everything offline, but you do have to find time to upkeep,” Gustin said. “I don’t align with the people making the argument that the magic is gone. It’s just a part of doing business sometimes.”

Yet social media scrutiny has never been higher, as cadres of theme park vloggers dissect and analyze every minute change to the parks, mining it for content — and often stoking controversy. Their argument, in short: nothing is changing except the price of tickets to get into the park and the array of things to do while there. 

“There’s a view amongst fans that these closures are unacceptable at a time where costs are increasing,” Williams, the academic researcher, said. “The increase in promotion of paid Lightning Lane access to jump queues is the main example, but increases in food and drink, removal of the free transfer by bus from Orlando airport to the resort, and increased parking costs at the resort are other issues.”

It’s all resulted in sluggish growth: overall attendance was up 2% last year, compared to per-capita ticket growth of 5%, investment bank Jefferies reported. But while the company is eking more out of individual parkgoers, guests aren’t spending as much as they used to — perhaps because they can’t afford it. 

It can’t be ignored that a Disney vacation is a luxury at a time when many households don’t have the spare cash to spend on luxuries. “All of this is against the backdrop of wider cost of living debates, as well,” Williams said. “Regular parkgoers are considering canceling annual passes because the parks are no longer seen as value for money.” 

Disney itself has recognized that potential downturn, warning in its third-quarter results last year that it expected weakness in park attendance compared to prior years, though in its full-year results, the company said that weakness was not as bad as first feared. 

But at a time when competition is rising, the most magical place on earth has to convince its visitors some of that pixie dust still works — rather than the sawdust currently strewn around the parks.

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based journalist. His latest book is “How AI Ate the World.”