Disney Making Big Changes to Ride to Fix Guest Complaints and Improve Storyline, See New Artwork Released

Last year Disney announced that they would be making big changes to the least popular Star Wars ride at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World. Today we just got more news about these changes during a presentation at Star Wars Celebration in Japan.

The new announcements include major changes to how the ride operates, including the introduction a new interactive storyline and a fix for the worst ride seat on board the old version of this attraction. It also introduces classic Star Wars destinations. This was one of our major criticisms in the original attraction.

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Changes to Disney’s Worst Star Wars Ride

Disney has continued to announce more details about changes to the Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland Park and Disney’s Hollywood Studios. The ride will receive a new storyline based on the characters of The Mandalorian and Grogu film. The new ride will debut alongside the movie on May 22, 2026.

Disney has already announced that during the new ride, guests will visit several iconic locations from the Star Wars universe including Tatooine, Bespin and Endor. Now, during the panel at Star Wars Celebration hosted by Ashley Eckstein featuring Walt Disney Imagineers and Lucasfilm executives, we just got more information including a new destination and more details on the ride changes.

The Imagineers revealed that the ride will also take guests to the city planet, Coruscant and within new artwork showed off that the ride will also take guests into the wreckage of the Death Star as part of the Endor destination. Now, that’s what I am talking about. You can see highlights from this artwork below.

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We also got more information about the storyline for the new attraction. It will not directly follow the storyline of the new movie. This is the official blurb:

“In this new story arc, Hondo Ohnaka catches wind of a deal on Tatooine between ex-Imperial officers and pirates, setting the stage for a high-stakes chase across the galaxy. Guests will team up with Mando and Grogu to track them down and claim a bounty in a dynamic, galaxy-spanning adventure.”

Our biggest complaint about this attraction has been that there were no stakes in the old storyline. As the story blurb calls out, this new version completely changes that. Now, guests are face-to-face with a true enemy that they have to evade. While it’s still not quite breaking the timeline as much as I asked for – I would have liked to see this ride change to guests getting to blow up the Death Star – it is a dramatic improvement over what is there currently. It’s interesting to see that Hondo Ohnaka is still a key part of this story. I assume that decision was made because they already have the complex Audio-Animatronic and don’t want to spend the budget to reskin it even if it would be really cool to see that as the Mandalorian holding Baby Grogu.

They also shared that “guests…will be in control of their own destination aboard Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run” and that as a crew you’ll get to choose your adventure destinations. According to Disney, Missions with Mando and Grogu will take off from Batuu and go to Tatooine; from there the crew will have an opportunity choose the next destination between the three new locations.

Also at the panel, they shared how there will be a big fix to what many consider to be the most boring position on the ride. There are three different positions with two of each position onboard the Millennium Falcon: pilot, gunner, and engineer. The engineer is our least favorite position right now because you really don’t get to do much besides hit buttons without much purpose.

Now, the engineer position will get expanded gameplay including getting to communicate with Grogu throughout the mission. While we are still getting specifics beyond the below information, even to have any other responsibility and feature added here is a clear demonstration that they’ve heard they can make this ride better. Here’s a look from the panel at how guests will interact with Grogu on the side screen.

Engineers also get to interact with Grogu on the side screen of Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run. #SWCJ pic.twitter.com/RmE2VLBxGu

— LaughingPlace.com (@laughing_place) April 20, 2025

Here are some of the new pieces of artwork released based on the new ride.

Coruscant Artwork:

Tatooine Artwork:

Bespin Artwork:

During the panel they mentioned that Star Tours will make a cameo appearance during the the Bespin sequence according to Laughing Place.

Endor Artwork:

We will continue to watch closely and share additional news about this as we get it.

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