On May 22, the same day Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives in theaters and IMAX nationwide, guests at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort will find a new reason to return to the cockpit of the fastest hunk of junk in the galaxy. Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run is being updated at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at both resorts to include a brand-new mission featuring Din Djarin and Grogu — along with new technology that lets flight crews choose which adventure they’ll take.
The update reflects Disney’s approach to storytelling across mediums, from the big screen to immersive, real-world experiences. As Asa Kalama, Executive, Creative & Interactive Experiences at Walt Disney Imagineering, explained, the attraction’s evolution is rooted in close collaboration with Lucasfilm, major advances in real-time technology, and a creative philosophy that traces back to Walt Disney himself.
Collaborating With Lucasfilm to Extend the Story
From the outset, the goal was to expand the film’s world in a way only a theme park attraction can.
“As we think about developing experiences for the parks, we like to find opportunities to not just retell the exact same story that you might have seen on screen, but use this as an opportunity to extend that story,” Kalama said. “It’s an inherently unique medium. It’s the physical world. And so we try to lean into the things that it does best.”
Conversations on how to achieve that began early, with Imagineers sitting down with The Mandalorian and Grogu director Jon Favreau and Lucasfilm President and Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni to hash out ideas.
“Before we got into any real technical development or detailed experiential design, we spent a lot of time just talking through story,” Kalama noted, describing discussions around iconic locations, character relationships, and how Hondo Ohnaka frames the adventure within Galaxy’s Edge.
The result is a mission that feels connected to the film while still standing on its own. Guests aren’t replaying what they just saw on the big screen — they’re stepping into a complementary adventure.
“We had to do all this really fun, narrative work to understand how all these things connect, and how they all feel like they’re a part of one broad cohesive story, and that the adventures that you’re having in park could conceivably be things that are happening… just off camera from the film,” Kalama said.
That alignment is especially meaningful because the attraction update and the film debut happen day and date. “For the first time ever, we’re allowing people… the opportunity to on the same day, go to the movie… and then later come down to the park and actually go on an adventure ride alongside them,” Kalama said.
Technology That Puts Choice in the Pilot’s Seat
Behind the scenes, the new mission required a significant technological leap. The attraction’s core systems have been upgraded to support richer visuals, more complex environments, and — most notably — guest choice.
“This latest mission, we upgraded the core technology that powers the attraction from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5,” Kalama explained. “Along with all new compute hardware and graphics cards, the latest and greatest from Nvidia that really allow us to push the limits of what we could do in terms of visual fidelity.”
Those upgrades made it possible to rethink how the adventure unfolds beyond what was originally a largely linear path.
“It was really important for us… to really increase the amount of variability, and sense of true control and agency that our flight crews have,” Kalama said. Guests can now choose between multiple planetary destinations, with branching paths and different outcomes within each one.
That choice comes with real engineering challenges. Because the visuals are rendered in real time and at extremely high quality, the system can’t load everything at once. “We’re actually constantly streaming the next set of environments that you’re going to be navigating through,” Kalama said. Introducing planetary selection meant the team had to preload entirely different worlds — Coruscant, Bespin, or Endor — on the fly, in a way that’s seamless to guests but “incredibly complicated on the technology side,” Kalama noted.
The payoff is an attraction designed for repeat rides, where no two missions feel exactly the same.
“The hope is you get off the attraction, and you’re sharing with your friends the adventure that you had, and maybe the things that you’re describing are different from the adventure that they went on,” Kalama said. “Which… is just another exciting reason to go back and re-ride.”
Walt Disney’s Flywheel, Brought to Life
Kalama often points back to a decades-old sketch by Walt Disney — a drawing that mapped how films, theme parks, and other parts of the business feed one another creatively. That “flywheel” is more than a historical artifact; it’s an active blueprint.
“To this day, I think we still take that framework of how to connect stories really to heart, and continue to be the only company that… consistently actually delivers against that vision,” Kalama said.
The update to Smugglers Run is a modern example of that philosophy in action. Characters and stories move fluidly between screen and park, sometimes in both directions. Kalama pointed to innovations like the BDX droids as evidence of that circular exchange, noting, “Disney is at its best when we can be creating amazing characters and stories really in any format and then translate it into another.”
At its core, the attraction is about empowering guests to live their own story. “We’ve always thought of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge as a place to come and live your own Star Wars adventure,” Kalama said. The new mission leans into that idea by giving guests meaningful choices and memories that feel personal.
“The hope is by making it so that every ride feels different, the story that you bring home is not a retelling of the story that we wanted you to hear, but a recounting of the story that you had to create with your family and friends,” he added.
As The Mandalorian and Grogu launches in theaters and IMAX on Friday, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run evolves alongside it — an experience shaped by collaboration, powered by technology, and guided by a creative flywheel that’s been spinning since Walt Disney was walking the parks.