Guests visiting Disney’s Hollywood Studios this month have been met with disappointment as it relates to the headliner attraction at Walt Disney World – Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. The attraction is celebrating its one year anniversary tomorrow, December 5, 2020.
The attraction has been experiencing somewhat of a slump in recent days, even above and beyond the typical difficulties. While it’s common for the attraction to experience downtime on a daily basis, the fact of the matter is that it has been going through a rough patch this week as we approach the one year anniversary of its opening.
As you can see in the chart below, the operational efficiency of the attraction was at a pandemic-era high last month after an increase in capacity at the attraction thanks to the installation of a considerable amount of plexiglass in the pre-show areas and on the attraction vehicle. Here’s a look at the total number of boarding groups processed by day (green is higher, red is lower).
The past few days have been really quite bad in terms of processed groups. We’ve never seen a stretch so bad in terms of groups processed in the plexiglass-era. We’d have to go back to late-October to find a similar run of groups processed, and even then it’s likely not fair to compare when considering the fact that Disney couldn’t process as many groups when dealing with what was probably south of 25% operational capacity.
To find a similar stretch of operational inefficiency, we’d probably have to go back to mid-September and what we described as an operational nightmare with only one vehicle moving through the attraction at a time. A pesky vehicle positioning system is often to blame when Rise of the Resistance struggles through the day. In particular, one of the positioning systems on an elevator in the massive AT-AT room seems to be problematic. You can see one of the elevators past the AT-AT leg in the photo below.
Here’s a look at the elevator when it isn’t functioning.
When the elevator is down, only one vehicle can operate at any given time as seen in our photo below with a missing vehicle in the load room.
In a recent virtual conference, Disney CTO Tilak Mandadi said that there were over 15,000 sensors on Rise of the Resistance. While technology can certainly push the envelope in terms of attraction experiences, one has to wonder if the implementation of technology in the case of Rise of the Resistance may have been premature or incorrectly applied.
It’s not just the vehicle positioning system that is struggling though. Even when the ride is functioning as intended, guests sometimes encounter the final Kylo Ren audio-animatronic in what is known as B-mode.
Now, this is not all to say that the attraction is somehow something to be avoided. To the contrary, it’s such a popular attraction that Disney has implemented something called a “Boarding Group”. Disney says that the attraction is in such high demand by guests that they have to implement a boarding group system to prevent long lines. Of course, having the ability to limit the amount of guests in line at any given time also has operational benefits when the attraction breaks down, and it breaks down often.
According to data collected by thrill-data.com, Rise of the Resistance experiences an average of 2.71 “delays” per day. A delay is defined as when the boarding groups don’t advance for more than 15 minutes or more. When the attraction is operating properly, Disney updates the boarding groups every 5 or 10 minutes. When there is downtime, they stop calling boarding groups until they can get the attraction running again.
On the eve of the one year anniversary of Rise of the Resistance, the attraction is still experiencing hours of downtime today with guests hoping that their boarding group will be called. As they prepare to confront Kylo Ren, the words of Jyn Erso have never been more true – “rebellions are built on hope”. Hopefully Disney is able to pour money and attention into an attraction that should be a home run a year later, but too often falls short.
