Rise of the Resistance Experiences Massive 7-Hour Opening Delay at Disney’s Hollywood Studios This Morning

Today marked the worst downtime for Rise of the Resistance yet. The ride didn’t open until around 2pm local time, a 7-hour opening delay.

While this is supposed to be Disney’s latest and greatest attraction, it has been plagued with downtime and nearly impossible-to-get Boarding Group Passes, a requirement to ride the attraction. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is definitely Disney’s most ambitious attraction in recent memory, with a lot of moving parts and millions of lines of code to get the attraction show ready.

While we’ve seen delays in opening in the past, a 7-hour delay is unprecedented and it likely means that a lot of guests will leave the park disappointed today. The “good” news is that there are only up to 86 boarding groups guaranteed to ride the attraction. Groups 1-86 were distributed in less than 90 seconds today, meaning that a great many guests were likely placed in backup boarding groups, which were fully distributed in about 25 minutes today.

While the Disneyland version of the attraction is running smoothly today, all boarding groups, including backup boarding groups, were distributed in less than 90 seconds today. Such a quick dispersion of backup boarding groups has been somewhat common over the past three days as the attraction only opened on January 17th in “Batuu West”.

Our advice remains the same as it has been for some time now, show up to Disney’s Hollywood Studios about an hour before park opening to ensure you’re in the park by the time boarding groups are available to snag on the My Disney Experience app. At 7am, it’s effectively a lottery as thousands of guests try to get into a boarding group and then cross their fingers that they don’t have to deal with downtime like we saw today.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on the boarding group process and provide you with some fresh advice and a look at crowd levels as we enter February to assist with your planning!