Disney's Hollywood Studios opened as as Disney-MGM Studios on May 1, 1989 and recently added two new lands: Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge and Toy Story Land. The park in 2020 opened Disney's first ride devoted to Mickey Mouse — Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, which you will find inside the replica of Hollywood's Grauman's Chinese Theatre that stands in the middle of the park.
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Other notable shows include Lightning McQueen's Racing Academy on Sunset Boulevard; Mickey Shorts Theater on Commissary Lane; and the Walt Disney Presents walk-through and theater on Mickey Avenue.
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Disney's Hollywood Studios is part of the sprawling Walt Disney World Resort, located in Lake Buena Vista, Florida – about 24 miles from Orlando International Airport.
Disney's theme park ticket prices vary by day, so you can use Disney's pricing calendar [scroll down] to see which days have the highest expected crowds. The lower the price for a ticket, the smaller the expected crowd that day.
In general, you will find the lightest crowd levels at the Walt Disney World theme parks during these periods:
Large crowds will fill the parks on runDisney weekends:
In addition, crowd levels are high during:
Whenever you plan to visit, you must make date-specific reservations in advance to use your tickets. You can see which dates are open to reserve on Disney's "Park Pass" availability calendar. See the next section, below, for more advice on planning your Walt Disney World visit.
The Walt Disney World Resort now requires that all guests make date-specific reservations in advance to visit its theme parks. You can see which dates are available to reserve on Disney's "Park Pass" availability calendar.
Dates are listed up to about 15 months in advance, and reservations are available on a first-come, first-served basis. However, Disney maintains separate pools of available reservations each day for its annual passholders and its on-site hotel guests, as well as for regular ticket holders. So if a specific date is "sold out" for annual passholders, it might still be available for regular ticket holders.
If you want to visit more than one Walt Disney World theme park on a single day, you will need a "Park Hopper" ticket. You will make a reservation for the park you visit first on each date, then you can park hop to other parks starting at 2pm that day.
Once you have selected the dates you wish to visit and made your Disney Park Pass reservations, you may want to make dining reservations in advance of your visit, as well. Reservations can be made via the Disney World website, and each date's reservations open 60 days in advance, at about 5:45am Eastern Time. Disney's on-site hotel guests may make reservations for their entire stay (up to 10 days) starting 60 days before their check-in date. That gives Disney's on-site hotel guests an advantage in making reservations for the most popular restaurants.
Disney's hotel guests also get 30 minutes of early access to each of the resort's four theme parks every day. So hotel guests should plan on an early start each morning to take advantage of empty queues. Unfortunately for guests staying off site, this new early admission policy means that they no longer have any opportunity to be the first to enter any Walt Disney World theme park in the morning.
As for planning your day, Walt Disney World now offers a new tool on its official My Disney Experience app to create a custom itinerary for each day of your visit. In addition, Disney offers two ways for its theme park guests to pay to access shorter wait times for many popular attractions. You can learn more about these options in our posts:
The tough line here is for the top-rated Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Because Disney's hotel guests slam that queue first thing in the morning, we recommend waiting until later in the evening to ride - or consider paying the $15 a person for Individual Lightning Lane access. Start your day at park opening instead with Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway, the head to The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Read our guide to Disney Genie for more advice on how to use Disney's app to avoid long wait times in the park.
