Did Disney Fix the Millennium Falcon Ride?

Behind closed doors, before he was Disney CEO, Josh D'Amaro told a room of 30 Imagineers the truth about the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run - "Guests like it, but they don't love it." When Smugglers Run opened in 2019, it was a paradox: one of the most brilliantly engineered rides Disney ever built, and one of its most disappointing. Imagineering had a fix: an entirely new mission starring the Mandalorian and Grogu, at Disney World and Disneyland. They had 18 months to pull it off. So I rode the new Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run 11 times in one day to find out — did they finally fix this ride, or is it still a hunk of junk? 📬 Get The Tip Board — free weekly Disney Intelligence in your inbox: https://guide2wdw.com/newsletter 📺 Watch my deep dive on all the updates at Disney World this summer:    • Disney World's Never Done This — Here's Wh...   🎧 ‪@ImaginationSkyway‬ Imagineering Muppets and Millennium Falcon:    • Imagineering Rock 'n' Roller Coaster and M...   👆 Subscribe for more Disney Intelligence: https://www.youtube.com/subscription_... The new Mandalorian mission is essentially a brand new ride running on the original's brilliantly engineered base: 30 hidden cockpits per coast, each one a motion simulator with a dome screen, five projectors, and a stack of NVIDIA GPUs rendering everything in real time. For 2026, Imagineering rebuilt it from the engine up: Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, all-new graphics hardware, and 3D assets pulled directly from ILM. But this video isn't really about the tech. It's about the three problems that kept the original ride from fulfilling its destiny: the Video Game Problem, the Pilot Problem, and the biggest one almost nobody talks about: The Star Wars Problem. I examine what went wrong in 2019, then put the new mission to the test: the choose-your-own-destination endings on Cloud City, Coruscant, and the Death Star wreckage above Endor, the branching paths and hidden secrets, the John Williams score, and the two things the update still didn't fix. Then I hand down a verdict. Is Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run a fixed ride? What do you think of the new Millennium Falcon mission — and what planet should Disney add next? Let me know. 🔎 Chapters: 0:00 — Did Disney fix the Millennium Falcon ride? 0:53 — Part 1: Millennium Falcon 2019 1:49 — The hidden genius: 30 Millennium Falcon cockpits 3:56 — Problem 1: The Video Game Problem 5:29 — Problem 2: The Pilot Problem 6:46 — Problem 3: The Star Wars Problem 10:00 — Part 2: Millennium Falcon 2026 10:32 — Under the hood: Unreal Engine 5 + the one-night switch 13:44 — What changed: Engineer, Gunner, and Pilot upgrades 17:36 — Does it finally feel like Star Wars? 19:57 — What wasn't fixed 20:50 — The Verdict: a ride worth loving? 🌐 Connect with Guide2WDW: Business Inquiries: [email protected] Patreon:   / guide2wdw   TikTok:   / guide2wdw   Instagram:   / guide2disney   Video by James Grosch: https://www.jamesgrosch.com Visit our site for more Disney intelligence: https://www.guide2wdw.com #millenniumfalcon #SmugglersRun #StarWars #GalaxysEdge #TheMandalorian #Grogu #Disneyland #WaltDisneyWorld #HollywoodStudios #DisneylandResort #WaltDisneyImagineering #WDI #DisneyImagineering #UnrealEngine #EpicGames #ILM #JoshDAmaro #StarTours #ThemeParkDesign #ThemeParkAnalysis #DisneyTech #DisneyParks #DisneyHistory #FutureOfThemeParks #Guide2WDW #DisneyIntelligence #millenniumfalconsmugglersrun