Yes, Star Wars has returned to the big screen with The Mandalorian and Grogu, and on the same day it hit theaters, it landed in two Disney Parks — Disneyland in Anaheim, CA and Disney World in Orlando, FL.
Disney Imagineering and Disney Experiences used the new film — and the fact it was made with the help of Unreal Engine — to rethink and retheme Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. It’s now really, really fun, even after more than a dozen rides, and the addition of The Mandalorian and the irresistibly adorable Grogu gives the attraction a shot of energy it genuinely needed.
It’s not a one-to-one adaptation of the film, and it didn’t require any physical updates to the Falcon itself or the attraction queues. You’ll still board the Millennium Falcon and join The Mandalorian and Grogu for a mission — the three roles of pilot, gunner, and engineer remain — but the engineer role has been completely overhauled and is no longer the least exciting seat in the cockpit.
That’s because the engineer now picks the planet; Bespin, Endor, or Coruscant — three distinct environments, and guests actually choose where they’re going. That variability was the central goal of the entire rethink, according to Morgan McDowell, a senior software project manager for Walt Disney Imagineering.
“We now have three different planets that our guests can fly to and fly through, and all the different variability within the planets that they go to,” McDowell said. “It’s more like a traditional video game — if I want to go right, I can go right. If I want to go left, I go left.”
All three roles still have a variety of buttons and controls to interact with. Pilots get a noticeably smoother experience and the chance to make the jump to lightspeed. Gunners have a critical role in collecting the bounty, with blaster fire that now visibly tracks targets.
But the engineer is the one driving the planet selection and gets near-constant access to Grogu throughout the ride — there’s a dedicated button that triggers cutscenes with the character, and taking care of Grogu is woven into the mission from start to finish.
The view outside the cockpit has been upgraded too. It runs at 4K, 60 frames per second — an improvement over the original — and across all three environments it’s smooth and vibrant, with none of the jitter or visual inconsistency that can break immersion in a motion simulator. A big part of making that possible is the move to Unreal Engine 5, new show game computers, and all-new Nvidia GPUs powering the attraction.
What makes the technical setup particularly interesting is that Disney Imagineering doesn’t run Unreal the way you would at home. Unreal Engine is typically designed to run on a single GPU — but this attraction demands far more than that.
“We’re running all-new Nvidia GPUs powering the graphics, as well as powering the new video game running on Unreal Engine 5,”
Morgan McDowell, Walt Disney Imagineering
So Imagineering built their own custom version of Unreal Engine capable of running across multiple GPUs simultaneously, which is what allows the attraction to render everything in real time: the main screen, the individual position screens, the lighting package, the audio, and up to six inputs at once during a four-to-five minute ride. That’s a tall order.
“We’re running all-new Nvidia GPUs powering the graphics, as well as powering the new video game running on Unreal Engine 5,” McDowell explained. She wouldn’t share the specific GPU model or configuration, but confirmed it’s a highly custom setup — and that Disney’s version of Unreal, currently tracking alongside the publicly released 5.7 and 5.8 builds, is meaningfully different from what’s available off the shelf.
“I think I have some of the smartest people on my team who own and innovate and update our build of the Unreal Engine, and that unlocks so many different things that we’re able to do that Unreal offers, but then we can do it in a multi-GPU setting,” she said.
The Lucasfilm partnership was central to making the day-and-date launch work. McDowell described teams from both sides working through the Florida install together around the clock, riding the attraction, flagging issues, and iterating on builds in real time.
“We had a lot of our Lucasfilm partners, or their QA lead, out here working with us day and night — getting the new builds on the new hardware in the attraction, and then actually running the game with them, and them doing tweaks, and us doing tweaks all together,” she said.
The result is an attraction that feels genuinely fresh. The random events spread across three planets, the role-specific interactions, and the Grogu moments give it a choose-your-own-adventure quality that holds up across multiple rides in a way the original never quite managed. There are also secret modes to unlock, including a Grogu-specific one, and easter eggs that vary depending on which planet you visit and which path you take through it. There’s even a trench run moment that, for what it’s worth, had me thinking back to flying a Lego X-Wing on the Sphere in Las Vegas — high praise for a theme park ride.
While Rise of the Resistance had arguably eclipsed Smugglers Run as the centerpiece Star Wars experience at both parks, The Mandalorian and Grogu update doesn’t just close that gap — it reframes what the attraction is. Less a set-piece ride, more a chance to live your own Star Wars story differently every time you board.
More broadly, rolling out a real-time video game experience across two parks on the same day a film releases speaks to what Unreal Engine is making possible for Disney Imagineering — and how quickly that capability is moving. Smugglers Run isn’t even the only attraction running it — Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin at Magic Kingdom is already powered by Unreal — and it’s clear Imagineering is thinking about where it goes next.
“We are always looking at the new features that are coming, and we do work with Epic on upcoming things,” McDowell said, “and we start to think of how we can use that technology to bring the best guest experience in our parks.”
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jacob.krol@futurenet.com (Jacob Krol)
