Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge Forecasts: Crowd Levels, Impact on Other Disney World Parks, Opening Date, etc.

By Dave Shute

Note: on March 7, Disney announced that Galaxy’s Edge will partially open on August 29, 2019.

There’s four questions to answer:

1. What will it be like in the new land itself?
2. What will it be like in the rest of Disney’s Hollywood Studios?
3. What impact will the opening have on the rest of the Disney World parks?
4. When will it actually open?

To some, the answer to the first three questions will be “horrible,” and to the fourth “August 29th, sorta.” But by looking at roughly analogous openings, you can develop a more nuanced set of forecasts.

In September 2017 when I published my first draft 2019 crowd calendar, I noted the following

“There’s no formal opening date for this land — “late 2019” is the rumor. I expect it to unfold much like Harry Potter did at Universal–with crushing crowds in the actual land, but not a huge spillover effect on the other parks–or even the rest of Hollywood Studios. If I’m wrong, expect to see an increase of a point or two in the crowd levels after it opens.”

What’s new since then is a better sense of the astonishing impact of Pandora on Disney’s Animal Kingdom.

So here’s my current forecast for Galaxy’s Edge.

1. WHAT WILL IT BE LIKE IN STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE?

This is the easy one to forecast. Galaxy’s Edge itself will be crushed with those interested in the Star Wars setting and its Millennium Falcon and battle rides for quite some time. I expect longer hours, daily Extra Magic Hours, and the use of FastPass+ or some other mechanism to restrict access to the actual land, not just the rides, but there will still be more demand to visit the land than capacity to serve it.

2. WHAT IMPACT WILL STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE HAVE ON THE REST OF DISNEY’S HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS?

Here I need to revise my September 2017 forecast a bit. I now expect the other “adult” rides in the park (e.g. Tower of Terror, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Star Tours) to see longer waits than I had initially thought. Visitors avoiding both the thrill rides and the new Star Wars rides should be OK, but everyone else will see substantially increased waits at the Studios.

Based on what has happened at Pandora, I now expect an annualized growth in attendance at the Studios after Star Wars opens of on the order of at least 4 million more visitors, bringing the park to (after what I expect to be the impacts of Toy Story Land and Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, another million visitors*) to an annualized run rate of about 15.5 million visitors, or almost 50% more than it saw in 2017.

Where does my four million come from? Well, here’s the increase in the relevant park’s attendance for the 12 months following** some recent major openings:

• Pandora (2017): 2.75 million
• Diagon Alley (2014): 2.4 million
• Hogsmeade (2000): 2.65 million
• The Animal Kingdom itself (1998): 8.6 million

So I am forecasting for Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge basically an opening near the scale of the Animal Kingdom’s opening, but divided across the two North American parks.

This makes the opening of Star Wars at Hollywood Studios almost a 50% larger opening than Pandora, and 60% larger than the average opening of the Harry Potter parks. Star Wars itself is a much more popular property than Pandora, and it will offer two world-class rides, rather than Pandora’s one world class ride and one also-ran.

On the other hand, Disney World Galaxy’s Edge attendance will be diminished by first the fact than an equivalent land will open earlier in California, drawing off some potential attendance, and second by the horror stories I expect to come out of Disneyland, leading some to defer attendance until later years.

Hollywood Studios park hours can fairly easily be expanded to the 14.5 hours/day we see this summer at Animal Kingdom, or more. Assuming its shows can have the number of times they are offered increased proportionality, this can add depending on the time of year 20-30% to its capacity, absorbing a couple million of the new visitors.

At that level of operating hours, the five new rides that will open at Hollywood Studios between now and then (the two Toy Story rides, the Mickey and Minnie ride, and the two Star Wars rides) will open additional capacity of about 100,000 individual rides a day. On average this equates to either 2+ rides for all 15.5 million visitors or about 7 rides per day for each of the 5 million new visitors. So on the math, the park can take this level of increased attendance.

The problem will be mismatches between supply and demand at individual attractions—especially at the two Star Wars attractions.

I get about enough capacity for every visitor to the park to see just one of the Star Wars rides on an average day. If more than half of park visitors want to see both of them, lines will skyrocket, and some of the Star-Wars aimed folks will balk at waits for those rides and go elsewhere in the park. And since I expect a fair proportion of the dedicated Star Wars visitors to not be interested in equal measure in the new capacity at the Toy Story Land rides or Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, the result will be heavy lines at the rides most popular for adults—Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror, and Star Tours.

3. WHAT IMPACT WILL STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE HAVE ON THE REST OF THE PARKS?

Everyone seems to think that the opening of a major land (or ride) has immediate spillover effects on the other parks. That simply has not been the case for Florida parks.

• When Disney’s Animal Kingdom opened, attendance at the other three parks remained flat for the next two and a half years. (Reasonable analysis covers only through 2000, as 9/11 makes comparison to 2001 too different. Attendance at the other three parks actually dropped substantially in 1998, but this was an artifact of Disney’s 25th anniversary celebration, which boosted all of 1997 but only bits of 1996 and 1998.)
• When Hogsmeade opened at Islands of Adventure, Universal Studios remained flat for two and a half years
• When Diagon Alley opened at Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure saw no increase the year it opened, and went up only 8% the next year
• When Pandora opened, the attendance in the other three Disney World parks remained flat

So my forecast for the impact of the Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge open on the rest of the parks: Very little, based on the historical record.

4. WHEN WILL STAR WARS: GALAXY’S EDGE ACTUALLY OPEN?

Note: on March 7, Disney announced that Galaxy’s Edge will partially open on August 29, 2019. No one yest knows when the land will be completely open. The material below may be helpful in establishing that…

The word from Bob Iger last September was that Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge would open at Disney World after the end of Fiscal 2019 but before the end of calendar 2019—that is, sometime in October through December. More recently the word is the Disneyland’s version will open in “summer” 2019 and Disney World’s version will open in “late fall.”

This last is more ambiguous than you might think, as there are at least four valid definitions of fall and no real meaning to the word “late.”

And the ambiguity is likely intentional, as it gives Disney some scope to be late in its plans. I would expect the Disney World version to open at least 120 days after the Disney Land version opens—to give Disney World time to learn from operating patterns in California well before it opens up FastPass+, which, given Annual Pass Calendars for Disneyland in June 2019 suggests no earlier than mid-October 2019.

By some of the four possible definitions of fall, that is also more than halfway through fall, so it suits the “late fall” concept. Mid-October is largely past the Columbus Day-focused fall break season at Disney World, and begins a period of two months when only one week—Thanksgiving week—sees really heavy crowds. While Disney has shown willingness to open rides during high crowd periods (Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Pandora both opened over Memorial Day weekend, a period more crowded than any between October 15 and December 15 except Thanksgiving week), it is operationally simpler to avoid such periods for opening.

Winter begins, depending on which definition you are using, during the period from early November through December 22, 2019. Given the value of some lower-crowd operating time, I’d think the latest thoughtfully projectable date for opening would be soon after Thanksgiving 2019, so that for now creates an opening period of mid-October to late November, but not likely Thanksgiving week itself.

Note that Kelly can help you book your DIsney World trip-either aiming at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, or aiming to avoid it.  Use the form below to contact her.

*I get the increment from Toy Story Land and Mickey and Minnie’s’ Runaway Railway by comparing them to the openings of New Fantasyland and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, each showing an increment of about a million visitors, and then dividing by two for the Studios being a less intrinsically attractive park than Magic Kingdom.

**Annualized rates are calculated by taking first year increases, dividing by the number of open days, and then multiplying by 365. All data is from TEA . The numbers are above, and an excel version of them is here.

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