It’s never fun when you’re at a theme park and a ride that you’ve been looking forward to going on shuts down unexpectedly. With so many moving parts it’s not exactly a shock when a ride has to go down, but some rides seem to end up not functioning a lot more than others. At Disney Hollywood Studios, two of the most popular rides are also the ones that go down most often. Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway reportedly went down 331 times in 2022, but Rise of the Resistance shutdown a shocking 580 times in the same period.
Rise of the Resistance and Runaway Railway are two of the newest and most popular attractions at Disney's Hollywood Studios, so these rides are certainly going to have some of the longest lines at Walt Disney World, even when things are working smoothly. When they’re not, the situation only gets worse. Rise of the Resistance specifically is a ride that frequently has serious issues. AllEars reports that there were only 63 days in 2022 when Rise didn’t shutdown at all, the 580 shutdows occurred on the other 302 days, meaning that when the ride did stop working it broke down nearly twice a day.
Certainly, many of these shutdowns were only brief stoppages that probably didn’t impact the attraction to any great degree, but it’s absolutely true that Rise of the Resistance at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland sees frequent stoppages. It’s incredibly frustrating for guests. It’s one thing to have to wait in a really long line, it’s another when that line lasts even longer because it literally stops moving.
And these ride stops cause a cascade of annoying issues. When Rise of the Resistance breaks down it means that guests who have spent extra money to skip the line, by purchasing an Individual Lightning Lane, can’t use them. This means that you get a bunch of people returning to use their LL after the ride is back up and running. Since these people paid extra, it usually means that large crowds of LL guests get let in at once, slowing down the stand by line that much more.
On the one hand, these attractions are using state of the art technology and that means that sometimes things will stop working. Both Runaway Railway and Rise are just big attractions, physically large, meaning that there’s a greater opportunity for things to go wrong because there's just a lot happening. At the same time, we don’t expect rides that are fairly new to see frequent ride stoppages. It’s the older rides that we would think would show their age by breaking down more often.
Of course, the only way to fix all this, if such a thing is even possible, is to take the attractions down for refurbishment, meaning they will be closed for extended periods while work is done, and because of how popular these rides are, it’s unlikely Walt Disney World really wants to do that unless it absolutely must. With Mickey and Minnie's Runaway Railway opening at Disneyland soon, hopefully they were able to fix some of the issues so it won't break down as much.
