Walt Disney World spent a good portion of 2020 closed due to the global pandemic and while the parks are back open now, and even re-instituted park hopping with the first of the year, there's a lot of recovery left to do. The parks are still being limited to about 35% of their total capacity and due to the fact that construction on new projects stopped for a time, and has been restarted at a slower pace, we were fully expecting delays in everything new Walt Disney World had planned for 2021 and beyond, but it now appears that at least one attraction, The TRON Lightcycle Run roller coaster for Magic Kingdom, may be delayed even more than originally believed.
Originally planned to open sometime in 2021, as part of Walt Disney World's 50th anniversary this year, Disney has been pretty quiet about plans for the Tron roller coaster since construction restarted. Considering the massive scope of the project, it was little surprise when rumors began to fly that the coaster would be delayed. However, according to BlogMickey, which recently posted new pictures of the under construction structure, it seems construction has ceased entirely, and the building has been sealed up. Indicated construction won't be restarting for quite some time.
It seems the plan is to weather seal the structure at this time, but that's going to take several months, and according to some rumors, construction won't begin again on the Lightcycle coaster until something this fall or winter, which is when the attraction was originally planned to open.
That puts reopening at some point in 2022 and likely later in the year rather than earlier. Construction stopped for several months when Magic Kingdom was closed and so one expected reopening to be delayed by at least as much time as construction stopped, but it seems it may be quite a bit longer than that,
This will mean that the Tron roller coaster will miss the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World entirely, and while certainly that celebration likely won't be everything the parks had originally been planning anyway, the new E-ticket was clearly designed to be the centerpiece of the new items meant to draw guests to the park for the celebration. In the case of the other big attraction that appears to be delayed into 2022, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, being delayed into 2022, isn't that big a deal, as that year will still be the 40th anniversary of Epcot, but with Tron being at magic Kingdom, a 2022 opening loses a bit of its luster, even if it won't really impact the number of people excited to check it out.
If nothing else, the apparent delay just shows how the events of the 2020 closure, both the physical and the financial, will have an impact that will repercussions throughout the parks for the next several years.
