Epcot's Guardians Of The Galaxy Roller Coaster Has Finally Opened The Standby Line, And The Results Are Surprising

It’s been nearly three years since the Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind roller coaster opened at Epcot, and from that point until now, parkgoers never had a line to physically wait in before riding. However, Disney World finally opened up a standby line so that guests who want to ride the roller coaster could simply get in line and do so without additional steps. One might have expected the line to be insanely long, but apparently not so much.

New attractions at Disney World have all used Virtual Queues when they opened, but Cosmic Rewind has utilized that and only that for its entire existence, which gave guests the option to reserve a place in line via a boarding group, to then get called whenever their turn to ride came up. Every new attraction has used this system to handle early crowds, but many rides that opened after Cosmic Rewind dispensed with it. Many insiders were prepared for the first standby lines to be absolutely insane, but they’ve actually been quite reasonable.

At one point the line peaked at around a 75-minute wait, but it has hovered around 50 minutes for most of the day. As I write this, as seen in the image above the wait time for Cosmic Rewind, in the bottom left corner, is 50 minutes, and the wait for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, in the upper right, is an hour.

It had been suggested that, due to the fact that Cosmic Rewind is the only real thrill ride at Epcot, the demand for standby access would be so great that the wait would consistently be multiple hours long. There was a pervasive belief that the Guardians queue simply wasn’t built to handle the massive number of people who would line up. The virtual queue, the argument went, was simply a necessity to keep the attraction from becoming completely unmanageable.

Even if the line wasn’t out of control forever, one would certainly expect the first day of the standby line to be busier, yet that hasn’t been the case. The longest lines at Disney World in the last few years have resulted in waits of several hours, but that’s just not the case here. Magic Kingdom's Tron Coaster ended its Virtual Queue last year even though the attraction opened a year after Guardians. Tron's wait times have also not been crazy, though the wait time for it right now is higher than Cosmic Rewind.

Nobody loves waiting in line, but there’s something to be said for the simplicity of being able to walk up and stand around. When the Virtual Queue was in place guests were limited to one ride per day, and if you missed the window to access the Virtual Queue or simply had a bad data connection you could be shut out of going on the ride entirely. At least now anybody who wants to go on the ride has the option.

There are now no attractions at Walt Disney World that use a virtual queue. In fact, the only Virtual Queue in use at any North American Disney park is for getting access to the World of Color nighttime spectacular at Disney California Adventure. Disney World has made it clear the days of the VQ are not done. It can, and almost certainly will, return for other new attractions.