Today marks the first day of the traditional standby queue operation for Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind since the attraction opened back in May 2022. More accurately, this is the first time that a standby queue has been used during daily operations. A standby queue has been used for special events, but never during the course of a normal operating day at EPCOT. The popular indoor roller coaster just passed the 1,000-day mark of utilizing a Virtual Queue to manage demand, but now, the standby line is open and wait times are (predictably) climbing. Here’s an on-the-ground look at the situation this morning during the rope drop period.
Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind Opens Standby Queue
Similar to when Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance opened its standby line, guests lined up by the hundreds this morning to ride the popular Cosmic Rewind attraction. Officially, the posted wait time reached 135 minutes during the first 30 minutes of park operation.
Even though EPCOT opened at 9am to the public, there were already hundreds of guests in line thanks to the Early Entry period that allows guests of the Walt Disney World Resorts the opportunity to enter the park 30 minutes before the official park open timeframe.
Of course, the first guests to get into line is the Early Entry crowd. Early Entry is a 30-minute head start on your day for guests staying at a Walt Disney World Resort hotel. The perk allows eligible guests to ride eligible rides 30 minutes before the park opens to all guests. As you might expect, the Early Entry line was not small today, but it wasn’t completely unmanageable, either. We did not have Early Entry this morning, so we’ll be showing what’s visible from regular guest areas. In all honesty, day one isn’t representative of what it’ll be like in a month or 6 months, so we’ll try to return for Early Entry once things have settled in a bit. That said, here’s a look at the Early Entry crowds before they were let into EPCOT, followed by a timelapse video of the moment they were allowed to enter.
Early Entry guests were let into the park at 7:55am, but they’re off to a secondary holding area. Essentially, the entire World Celebration Gardens is open to Early Entry guests, with additional lines forming for entry into World Discovery, World Showcase, and World Nature. We don’t have visibility into that process today, but we’ll be back to take a look at Early Entry soon.
On the day guest side of things, crowds were extremely modest today. It’s a Tuesday and a “Good-to-Go” day, meaning that Annual Passholders do not need to make a reservation to enter any of the Walt Disney World theme parks. “Good-to-Go” days are essentially indicators from Walt Disney World that they expect such low crowds that they don’t even care to implement a reservation system. It’s kind of a catch-22 though, because even though their internal metrics say that crowds will be low, something like Cosmic Rewind heading to standby for the first time ever will surely draw crowds – or so you’d think.
EPCOT allowed all guests to tap into the park around 7:30am, which is standard. If I were guestimating, I would say that some 95% of guests who entered EPCOT before 8:15am were guests with Early Entry privileges.
The rest of this article will be from the vantage point of regular rope drop guests. Here’s a look at the rope drop crowds for day one of the Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind traditional standby offering!
We’ll start with a look at the crowds around 8:45am – just 15 minutes before rope drop. If you want to be at the front of this line (and the back of the Early Entry line), we’d recommend showing up before 8:15am. If you’re visiting on a busier day, you might want to arrive even earlier.
Before we jump into the photos, I should note that we’ve done a lot of “day one” offerings at Walt Disney World, and while the crowds were large for this, they were very manageable thanks to the extended queue design and routing. EPCOT ops did a wonderful job of ensuring a controlled “chaos” situation this morning – and it really wasn’t all that chaotic from our vantage point.
By 9:30am, the posted wait time had reached 135 minutes, but it would quickly die down as guests moved through the efficient attraction.
Star-Lord was even out early this morning to greet guests! As you can see, the queue was starting to moderate even when we took this photo around 9:45am.
Here’s a look at a timelapse of the initial rope drop crowds funneling into the queue.
It’ll be interesting to keep an eye on wait times for Cosmic Rewind to see where it fits into the overall Walt Disney World attraction landscape. According to info from thrill-data, TRON Lightcycle Run holds the crown of the longest average wait time in 2025 with a nearly 2-hour average wait time. Here’s a look at the top 10 attraction average wait times this year so far:
- TRON Lightcycle Run | 116 minutes
- Avatar Flight of Passage | 83 minutes
- Slinky Dog Dash | 78 minutes
- Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance | 76 minutes
- Seven Dwarfs Mine Train | 68 minutes
- Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster | 67 minutes
- Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure | 66 minutes
- Big Thunder Mountain Railroad | 64 minutes*
- Frozen Ever After | 63 minutes
- Na’vi River Journey | 58 minutes
*Big Thunder Mountain Railroad was only open for the first week of the year, which is abnormally busy
We expect that Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind will end up near the top of the list, but it is an efficient attraction that is relatively reliable, which should keep wait times manageable.
Cosmic Rewind will do a lot of heavy lifting over the next few months at EPCOT with the nearby Test Track still closed for a reimagining until late Summer. When Test Track 3.0 reopens, it’ll soak up some of the crowds due to the newness factor.
Overall, Cosmic Rewind standby queue is off to a good start and it’ll be interesting to see what average wait times look like for one of Walt Disney World’s most popular attractions.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!
Do you have any insights into what this looks like for guests entering via the International Gateway/Skyliner? Thanks!