Disney World 2025 Ride Closures & Ticket Discounts: Impact on Crowd Levels

Planning a trip to Disney World in 2025? Get ready for a year of major changes that will impact crowd levels, wait times, and your overall park experience. Several major Disney rides are closed or will close, while others will be re-themed and re-open. Disney has also just introduced new ticket discounts for Florida residents. In this article I’ll look at how these changes might affect park crowd patterns throughout the year. 

I’ll also explain how these new discounted Disney World tickets work and if they’ll affect park crowds. As always, TouringPlans is ready with tools like our Crowd Calendar to guide you through these new developments.

2025 Magic Kingdom Ride Closures & Crowd Impacts

Disney has announced a $60-billion spending campaign for its parks and experiences. That includes the new Tropical Americas land in Animal Kingdom, and we’ve already been able to figure out a lot about what’s happening there.  But that’s not scheduled to open until 2027 at the earliest.

The Magic Kingdom is getting two new lands. The first, themed to Pixar’s Cars franchise, will take over most of the existing Liberty Square land. The second new land, themed to Disney’s villains, will take undeveloped land behind the park as well as parts of Frontierland and Liberty Square.

Disney hasn’t yet given opening dates for these new Magic Kingdom lands, but it’s hard to see how they’d open before 2028. That’s especially true if Disney wants to use a rolling schedule of openings to drive repeat visits every year during this construction process.

Big Thunder Mountain

We already know of a couple of Magic Kingdom ride closures though. The major one is Big Thunder Mountain, which closed January 6, 2025 and should remain closed well into 2026.

Big Thunder Mountain is one of the top 5 most popular attractions in the Magic Kingdom, and probably the most-requested Lightning Lane Multi Pass attraction in the park. I’ve recently covered your best Lightning Lane options during Big Thunder’s closure, for adults and for parents with young children.

Big Thunder Mountain’s closure should reduce crowds on the west side of the park, especially Frontierland and the west side of Adventureland. That impact will be even greater during January, February, and March, when cooler temperatures mean fewer guests willing to risk getting wet on the log flumes of Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.

In fact, weather might be the reason that Tiana’s Bayou Adventure doesn’t appear in the Magic Kingdom After Hours attraction lineup through March, 2025, even with Big Thunder Mountain closed.

With fewer reasons to go to Adventureland, I think many guests will opt to stay longer in Fantasyland and Tomorrowland, especially in the morning. That may mean longer lines for attractions like Seven Dwarfs Mine Train in Fantasyland, and TRON Lightcycle / Run and Space Mountain in Tomorrowland.

Big Thunder Mountain’s ride capacity is probably around 1,535 guests per hour.

Closing Tom Sawyer Island, Liberty Square Riverboat, and Rivers of America

Disney hasn’t yet said when these attractions and areas will close for construction. And the exact timing of their closure will tell us if the Villains land or Cars land is going to open first. Either way, Disney World might have to announce more closures first.

Neither Tom Sawyer Island nor the Liberty Square Riverboat are especially popular attractions. The Riverboat doesn’t even operate all day – it typically begins operating late morning, around 11 a.m., and it usually closes before the rest of the park, typically 6 or 7 pm. The boat leaves twice per hour for its circle around the River of America. Although the Riverboat can handle around 450 guests per ride, it’s rare to see it completely full. So I don’t think the Riverboat is handling more than 600 or 700 guests per hour.

Capacity on Tom Sawyer Island is limited by a couple of things. One of them is that you have to take a raft over to the island from Frontierland. I think these rafts can handle around 40 people each trip, give or take. I usually see one to three rafts in operation, and a round-trip on the rafts takes around 10 minutes, including loading and unloading time. Given those numbers, I’d be surprised if Tom Sawyer Island was seeing more than 600 guests per hour.

Walt Disney World Railroad Closure

Disney hasn’t yet said this, but I would also expect the Walt Disney World Railroad to close at some point during the Cars- and Villains-land construction. Construction projects of this magnitude require moving tons of dirt, typically with dump trucks running continuously throughout the day.

Those vehicles need to move dirt between inside the Magic Kingdom and outside the park. Since the Walt Disney World Railroad circles the park (and has a station in Frontierland), it means the trucks will have to go over the train tracks to move that dirt.

Disney has closed the Walt Disney World Railroad for long periods of time before. The most recent example was during the construction of TRON Lightcycle / Run in Tomorrowland. TRON’s construction site included part of the railroad’s tracks, which made running the railroad impossible. As a result, the Walt Disney World Railroad was closed for over four years, from December 2018 to December 2022.

The Walt Disney World Railroad has an enormous ability to move thousands of guests per hour. But it doesn’t, for a variety of reasons. First, two of the Railroad’s three stations are in areas with few guests. The Main Street, USA train station is only useful to guests coming into the parks, and that number drops as the day goes on. Also, the Fantasyland station is located far back in the corner of Storybook Circus, well away from the center of foot traffic in Fantasyland. 

Including data from other sources, I would be surprised if the Walt Disney World Railroad handled more than 900 guests per hour on average.

Astro Orbiter Closure in Tomorrowland

The other closure we know about already is Tomorrowland’s Astro Orbiter, closed from January 13, 2025 through sometime in the summer. The good news here is that the Astro Orbiter isn’t popular and doesn’t participate in Lightning Lane. It’s also a relatively low-capacity ride, able to handle roughly 400 riders per hour near its peak. That’s not much in the overall scheme of things, and it’s not going to be gone for long.

Lost Capacity From Magic Kingdom Ride Closures

Let’s add up the numbers from Big Thunder’s closure, plus the eventual closure of Tom Sawyer Island, the Liberty Square Riverboat, and the Walt Disney World Railroad. 

If all of those attractions were closed at the same time, I’d expect the Magic Kingdom to lose a maximum of around 3,600 rides per hour. 

The good news is that the remaining Magic Kingdom attractions in just Tomorrowland and Fantasyland can probably handle at least 19,000 guests per hour. And that’s assuming that large theater-type attractions like Carousel of Progress and Monsters, Inc. Laugh Floor are not operating at full capacity. Adding in attractions from other lands, like Pirates of the Caribbean and Haunted Mansion, and the park’s remaining capacity is at least 25,000 guests per hour.

Our worst-case scenario is one where Big Thunder, Tom Sawyer Island, the Liberty Square Riverboat, and the Walt Disney World Railroad are all offline at the same time. That would represent roughly 10% to 15% of the park’s overall ride capacity. And I don’t think it’s going to be that bad.

It also helps that neither the Walt Disney World Railroad, Tom Sawyer Island, nor the Liberty Square Riverboat participate in Disney’s Lightning Lane program. With only Big Thunder’s Lightning Lane capacity gone, it’s easier for the remaining attractions to take up the lost riders.

My sense is that we’ll see wait times at the remaining rides increase proportionally to the lost riders, so maybe around the 10% range as an upper limit. 

The average mid-day wait time across all Magic Kingdom attractions in 2024 was around 27 minutes. Projecting a 10% increase in those wait times brings us to around 30 minutes. That might be an increase of 1 point on our Walt Disney World crowd calendar. 

Animal Kingdom Ride Closures in 2025

The Animal Kingdom will close TriceraTop Spin and the Fossil Fun Games area of Chester & Hester’s Dino-Rama next week, impacting about half of Dinoland, USA. 

TriceraTop Spin’s hourly capacity likely tops out at around 600 guests per hour. I doubt it averages anything close to that, especially in the morning and evening. So the impact of closing TriceraTop Spin is likely negligible when spread out over the whole park.

Kali River Rapids has already closed for its annual winter refurbishment and is scheduled to reopen in March. 

The other half of Dinoland contains Dinosaur, which will eventually be replaced with a Mayan-themed Indiana Jones ride as part of Dinoland’s conversion to Tropical Americas.

Disney has already said that Dinosaur won’t close until 2026. My guess is that Disney wants to wait until the It’s Tough to Be a Bug film is replaced with a new movie, “Zootopia: Better Zoogether!”, timed to coincide with the November 26, 2025 release of Zootopia 2 to theaters. Disney’s hoping that the new Zootopia movie will draw enough people to make up for lost capacity at Dinosaur. 

Dinosaur can handle around 1,500 people per hour on average. There are around 428 seats in the It’s Tough to Be a Bug theater. Assuming the new film’s length allows Disney to show the new movie four times per hour, that would be an hourly capacity of around 1,700 guests. While that’s enough to cover Dinosaur’s lost capacity, it doesn’t account for the number of guests that are already seeing It’s Tough to Be a Bug.

The theater has no more than half-full the last few times I’ve seen It’s Tough to Be a Bug. So I think the best Disney can hope for with Zootopia: Better Zoogether is to cover about half the capacity that’s going to be lost when Dinosaur closes.

That would seem to leave the park with a capacity gap of around 1,350 guests per hour: 600 from TriceraTop Spin and 750 from Dinosaur. But that’s not going to happen until 2026. For 2025 the impacts should be minimal.

Impact of Disney World’s 2025 Ticket Discounts on Park Crowds

Earlier this week Disney World launched a set of ticket deals for Florida residents called “Discover Disney.” These are 3- and 4-day tickets for Florida residents that come with substantial discounts, about 50% over the cost of a regular ticket. They also require park reservations, but they don’t expire the way that a regular ticket does. Locals who buy these tickets can use them any time until May 23, 2025, as long as they have unused days on the ticket.

How Will Disney World’s New Ticket Deals Affect Crowds?

The new Discover Disney tickets are valid from January 13 through May 23, 2025. In terms of crowd impact, my initial thought is that crowds might be concentrated at the beginning and end of those ranges. That is, there might be a whole group of Florida residents who haven’t been to the parks in a while, and who can’t wait to go.

And on the opposite end, there are always people who’ll have one or two days left on those tickets and need to use them by May 23, 2025. That’s a Friday, so the weekend before that – May 17th and 18th – would be the last weekend for Florida residents to use these tickets.

How much of an increase in park crowds might there be in mid-May when these tickets are about to expire? For reference, I looked at three similar ticket deals Disney offered in 2024: 

• The Florida Resident Disney Thrills ticket discounts that ran from January 11 through March 15, 2024.
• The 4-Park Magic Ticket that ran from April 2 through September 22, 2024 and the similar 3-Day 3-Park Ticket that ran through September 24, 2024

Like the Discover Disney tickets, the Florida Resident Disney Thrills tickets expired on a Friday (March 15). How crowded was the previous weekend in Walt Disney World? Here are the actual crowd levels we measured:

• Friday, March 8, 2024: Magic Kingdom crowds were a 5 out of 10
• Saturday, March 9, 2024: Magic Kingdom crowds were a 5 out of 10
• Sunday, March 10, 2024: Magic Kingdom crowds were a 6 out of 10

These actual crowd levels were slightly lower than the 7 we’d predicted for the park that weekend. And across Walt Disney World, posted wait times for rides were in line with our predictions:

• EPCOT’s average crowd level was ~6 out of 10 for the weekend
• Hollywood Studios’ average crowd level was ~7 out of 10 for the weekend
• Animal Kingdom’s average crowd level was ~6 out of 10 for the weekend

That means we didn’t see a last-minute surge of Florida residents trying to use their remaining admission when those Disney Thrills tickets expired.

Similarly, the 3- and 4-Park Magic Tickets expired on Sunday, September 22, 2024 and Tuesday, September 24, 2024. What were Disney World crowds like the previous weekend (September 14-15) and that weekend (September 21-22)?

• Magic Kingdom crowds were a 4 on Saturday, September 14, 2024 and we’d predicted a 4. We measured a crowd level of 1 on Sunday, September 15 and predicted a 2.
• Our predictions for EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom for that weekend were either exactly right or under by 1. 

Our predictions were pretty solid for the last eligible weekend for those 3- and 4-Park Magic Tickets, too. For the eight predictions we made for the four parks over both days:

• Two were exactly right.
• We overestimated crowds by 2 once at the Magic Kingdom (predicted 3 and it was a 1)
• We overestimated crowds by 3 once at Hollywood Studios (predicted 7 / was 4)
• We were off by 1 four times

That means we also didn’t see unexpected hordes of Florida residents trying to use these tickets the weekend that they expired.

That comes with the usual disclaimers: Past history isn’t a guarantee of future behavior, and things can happen between now and May 23, 2025. 

The one scenario that might happen is that some Florida residents decide to couple the opening of Epic Universe on May 21, 2025 with a couple of days of Disney World around that time. But May 21, 2025 is a Wednesday, so Floridians taking off before and after then would be using an entire week of vacation days. I think that’s going to limit some of this ticket demand.

Wrapping Up This Attraction and Ticket Discount Analysis

These ride closures, ongoing construction projects, and new ticket discounts at Disney World in 2025 may affect your park experience but probably not your waits in line. While some attractions like Big Thunder Mountain and Kali River Rapids will temporarily close, Disney is already working on future projects, including new lands and shows, that’ll open in 2025 and beyond.

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