Disney Hints at Opening Date For New Magic Kingdom Nighttime Starlight Parade

Recent shifts to Disney schedules give us a far better sense of when the new nighttime Disney’s Starlight: Dream the Night Away Parade in Magic Kingdom will debut.

While we expected a debut date for the parade closer to Memorial Day weekend, the parade is now slated to debut “later this summer”. We were left wondering when this debut date will be.

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New Disney’s Starlight Parade Debut Date Signs

Disney has already announced a couple of different new offerings coming at the beginning of this summer to Walt Disney World. The new villains show and Little Mermaid show will both debut at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. At this same time, new kid-focused offerings will debut with more characters throughout the parks and other new offerings.

In addition, the new Disney Starlight: Dream the Night Away parade is also debuting this summer. This will be the first nighttime parade at Walt Disney World in nearly 10 years and should be a major draw. We have been detailing some of the exciting floats coming to the new parade and the reveal of the stunning poster and more looks.

We expected that Disney’s Starlight Parade would debut at this same time as the other offerings as the centerpiece of the summer event kickoff. It would help to drive interest in the parks during a summer that we are predicting will have somewhat lower crowds on our Mickey Visit Disney World Crowd Calendar and help to drive visitors to Disney World if they are coming in for Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park. Instead, it has been pushed off to later this summer. This is likely due to delays. If Disney could debut the parade at the beginning of the summer, I am confident that they would.

Now, we are starting to get a sense of when the parade will debut based on new shifts to the schedule. These changes line up with our initial comments that if they were going to push the parade off only a few weeks and they knew that date they would have announced when that opening would be. Instead, they didn’t announce the opening, which led us to believe that they were both relatively far off from announcing the date and that they didn’t actually have a firm date for the show yet. We now have new signs pointing to an opening period.

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Over the weekend, we heard about two changes to the entertainment schedule and Cast Member blockout dates.

The entertainment schedule starting July 6, 2025, has shifted to move the Happily Ever After fireworks to 10 pm. During this week, fireworks are scheduled for 9 pm and then shift back to 9:20 pm during the next two months to accommodate a later sunset time. It’s not uncommon that the fireworks shift later in the summer, but 10 pm is far later than fireworks are typically scheduled.

This shift in the fireworks time could be to accommodate a schedule for two nighttime parade showtimes at the Magic Kingdom.

Starting July 3 through at least the end of July, Cast Members are blocked from visiting Magic Kingdom as a guest. They blockout dates are typically used during busy periods of the year when Disney wants to limit the amount of complimentary admissions that Cast Members get to hold those spots for paying guests. This is a way that Disney limits crowds on days that they anticipate will be in high demand.

These blockouts aren’t surprising due to the July 4th holiday, but it is notable that the blockout period stretches through the rest of the visible calendar in July. If the parade is starting right then, it makes sense as Disney would want to hold these dates for potential high crowds at Magic Kingdom and could always lift the blockout for Cast Members as crowds become more normalized.

So, all of this leads us to the conclusion that the likelihood of a parade start date goes way higher starting on July 6, 2025. I would still not think that the parade will definitely start on that date, but rather that July 6 is the earliest possible debut date. We could see the parade start anytime after this.

Based on the above shift to move the fireworks back, it seems like we could see one parade showing before the fireworks around 9 pm and another parade showing after the fireworks closer to 11 pm.

Again, we don’t know if Disney even knows when the parade would start. July 4th would have been a logical milestone date for the launch of the parade, but Disney may not have the ability to choose when the parade can debut based on the moving parts required to align ahead of the launch.

We should get more information soon on when we will see this new parade debut. At Mickey Visit, we bring you the latest Disney World and theme park news. Stay tuned here and on our newsletter to not miss anything.

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