Disney has announced that the virtual queues in use for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure at Magic Kingdom and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at Epcot will be replaced by regular standby queues beginning February 25, 2025. Cosmic Rewind will also join Early Entry at Epcot, per its operating hours, as noted by Blog Mickey. Here are our initial thoughts, with much more to come (particularly once the change actually happens)…

First, Tiana’s. It’s good to hear that Disney has enough faith in Tiana’s to end the virtual queue. That virtual queue was originally only expected to be in use during the “initial” opening period. Well, 200+ days later, I guess that initial period is ending.

My initial reaction to Tiana’s dropping its virtual queue is “okay, plan to ride it midday.” I’ll throw in a dash of “it’ll be slightly lower priority on Multi Pass going forward.” But overall this isn’t a gamechanger in my mind.

That’s in contrast to the situation at Epcot, where Cosmic Rewind joining Early Entry instantly makes it the go-to for rope drop at that park.

There are two questions that we don’t have answered about this change to Cosmic Rewind:

Will Epcot rope drop procedures change at all?
With or without changes, how will guests using the International Gateway (Skyliner) entrance do trying to rope drop Cosmic Rewind?

Guests entering via the Skyliner entrance have a long walk to Guardians. They’d handily get beaten by a huge number of guests from the front of the park under current procedures, which usually have them held somewhere in the UK/Canada area.

My hope is that Disney finds a way to allow these guests to be held closer to Cosmic Rewind prior to it opening. At best, we’ll see a change on February 25. At worst, it’ll be the sort of thing that requires months and months of negative guest feedback before it gets addressed.

Between best and worst, there will be no change but I’ll constantly be expecting one. Disney never seemed to care that guests at the front of the park had the short end of things getting to Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, so maybe the same reasoning will apply to Cosmic Rewind.

I definitely hope to have more thoughts soon. I’ll probably wait to personally experience the Cosmic Rewind rope drop until I’m confident Disney has settled on how they’ll handle the Skyliner folks. Until then, we’ll be keeping an eye on the

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