If you’re planning a visit to Disneyland, then getting your day off to the right start is the first step in a perfect visit to the Happiest Place on Earth. In this post, we’ll discuss Disneyland rope drop—how to start your day at the park. We’ll cover everything from when to arrive to what rides to start with to how Lightning Lanes impact your strategy. Read on to learn all about rope drop at Disneyland!
About this Post and Related Posts
In this post we discuss rope drop—the first few hours of your day, from waking up to arriving at the park to riding your first few rides—at Disneyland park. This post does not cover the other park at Disneyland Resort, Disney California Adventure. If you are a guest of a Disney hotel and using the Early Entry post, you’ll want to also read our post dedicated to Early Entry at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.
If you’re looking to put together the perfect day at Disneyland, we have a Disneyland One Day Itinerary post that talks through your options for doing that. We have a Guide to Lightning Lanes at Disneyland, too. We recommend buying Lightning Lane Multi Pass for at least one day of your visit to the resort, and your Multi Pass and Lightning Lane strategy will impact your rope drop strategy.
Keep in mind that your rope drop options might be impacted by height requirements, so be sure to read up on Disneyland Height Requirements and Rider Swap. And if you’re new to learning about the park and need to know more about the rides before picking which to start with, we have a Disneyland Rides Guide and Ranking post.
Update: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure Opens November 15
Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the Splash Mountain replacement, opens November 15, 2024. When it opens, there will be two ways to experience the ride: a virtual queue and via Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
The virtual queue will be accessible in the Disneyland app and will have two enrollment periods, at 7AM and 12PM. You can read more virtual queue details at the Disneyland website here.
When it debuts, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will be the 13th ride at Disneyland park that’s a part of Lightning Lane Multi Pass. As long as it uses a virtual queue, we think you’re justified in making Tiana’s Bayou Adventure your first Lightning Lane pick. I plan to check this advice against actual virtual queue and Lightning Lane availability right around November 15.
Once the ride switches the regular standby and its place in rope drop and Lightning Lane priority settles, we’ll put the ride into the regular flow of our content. For now, you either get on it via the virtual queue or via Lightning Lane Multi Pass, and you just ride when it’s your time.
Update: Haunted Mansion Reopens With Virtual Queue
Rope drop at Disneyland now starts on your phone before you get to the park. After a lengthy refurbishment, Haunted Mansion has officially reopened. It reopened with its Haunted Mansion Holiday overlay. More importantly, it reopened with a virtual queue and no standby line or Lightning Lane.
Per Disney, “there are 2 daily opportunities to request to join the virtual queue for Haunted Mansion Holiday:
7:00 AM – Guests must have a park reservation for Disneyland Park with a one-park ticket or a park reservation for Disneyland Park with a Park Hopper ticket to request to join the virtual queue.
12:00 PM (Noon) – Guests inside Disney California Adventure Park with a Park Hopper ticket or inside Disneyland Park can request to join the virtual queue.”
We recommend trying to join right at 7AM if possible. So far, virtual queue availability has looked pretty good, but we never like to risk missing out on this great ride.
Basics of Rope Drop at Disneyland
Let’s start with some basic information before diving into the more complex aspects of strategy.
What is “rope drop”?
The beginning of the day at a theme park can be the most important part of the day. Crowds will be near their lowest, and if you arrive early enough you can be among the first people on basically any ride in the park.
Rope drop basically refers to how you start your day at a theme park. If the park opens at, say, 8AM, you shouldn’t plan to just arrive at 8AM, see the gates open, and walk onto whichever ride you want to start at.
Rather, you’ll probably want to arrive earlier than opening time to get ahead of the crowds. The park gate might open before the scheduled opening time…but you still won’t have access to the entire park. You’ll want to know what ride you’re going to start with and where the guests going to that ride are being corralled.
“Rope drop” is all of this—picking your first ride and knowing when to arrive and where to go. And sometimes it includes the next steps too—which rides to go to second, third, and so on.
If you have Multi Pass, you’ll want to know which ride to make your first Lightning Lane pick, too. If you have Early Entry, you’ll need to know how your strategy will differ from guests without Early Entry.
What is Early Entry at Disneyland?
Early Entry is a perk available only to guests staying at one of the three Disneyland Resort hotels—Disneyland Hotel, Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel, and Disney’s Pixar Place Hotel. Early Entry grants these guests access on select days to select attractions at the parks for an extra 30 minutes in the morning. For more on that perk, read our Guide to Early Entry at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure.
If you don’t have Early Entry, we advise against visiting on days when Disneyland has Early Entry. That said, if you wind up in the park on such a day, you’ll probably just need to avoid any rope drop strategies that take you into Fantasyland or Tomorrowland, where the waits will already be growing during Early Entry.
What time should I get to Disneyland?
We recommend that guests with Early Entry plan to arrive at the park gates 15 minutes before the start of Early Entry. We recommend guests without Early Entry plan to arrive at the park gates 30 minutes before scheduled park open. Keep in mind you’ll need to account for parking and security time, too.
On busier days, you might arrive even earlier, but at some point you have to be pragmatic. If the park is open from 8AM to 11PM, for example, you want to make sure you get enough sleep to take advantage of those late evening hours, too.
Disneyland Rope Drop Options
Of course you can rope drop any ride in the park (except in the rare cases where a ride opens later than the park), but the point of your rope drop strategy is to take advantage of low morning crowds to save time later in the day.
Importantly, rope drop strategy is only one part of your overall strategy for the day, and you can’t think about it without keeping the rest of your plans in mind. In particular, there are two big factors that will determine how you spend rope drop—your personal priorities and your Lightning Lane strategy.
Minding your priorities does not mean you have to visit the ride that is most important to you to start the day (though you might decide to do that). It’s a more general idea that you’re working with a limited amount of time and you need to understand that different strategies have different costs and benefits.
As for Lightning Lane strategy, well, don’t rope drop a ride you’re buying a Lightning Lane Single Pass for. Probably don’t rope drop a ride that’s on Multi Pass if you have Multi Pass, unless you really want to ride it twice (or maybe you’re park hopping and won’t fit every Multi Pass ride at Disneyland into your morning).
If you’re familiar with Walt Disney World, you should know that planning your rope drop is much different in Disneyland. And whether you’re familiar with Disney World or not, you should know the two big reasons for this difference.
First, most rides at Disneyland don’t have Lightning Lanes. This means that morning time when waits are low is even more important because once waits creep up on a lot of rides you either wait in line or you don’t ride.
Second, Disneyland has a high concentration of short rides with short morning waits that don’t have Lightning Lanes. These are basically the “kiddie” rides in Fantasyland, plus a few in Tomorrowland. Because you can quickly hop from one to another to another to another while waits are still low, you’re able to finish a big chunk of the rides without Lightning Lanes early in the day, if you so choose (and this winds up being our go-to recommendation).
There is one big similarity with Walt Disney World, though, and that’s Lightning Lane Single Pass. There is one ride at Disneyland park that has a Lightning Lane Single Pass available for separate purchase and not a part of Multi Pass. This is Rise of the Resistance. Since this is a popular ride, it’s also a viable candidate for rope drop.
All of this boils down to three options for rope drop at Disneyland that we’re going to discuss. I’m going to quickly list them here. Then I’ll open each specific section with an explanation of who the rope drop makes sense for and why we like it. If you decide it’s not for you, move onto another option. The three rope drop strategies we’ll be discussing here are:
Fantasyland Rope Drop
Rise of the Resistance Rope Drop
All Other Rope Drops
One More Thing… (Post-Rope Drop)
2024 Note: This section mentions that we keep our eyes on Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise wait times in the morning and try and get to those rides before waits go up. Through an unspecified date, Pirates of the Caribbean is on Multi Pass. If you have Multi Pass, you could accordingly de-prioritize getting to that ride.
Before we get to the specific rope drop strategies, I want to add a quick note about what we’re hoping to do immediately after rope drop. It’s important to know this because when you’re actually in the park you’ll need to know when to squeeze in one more ride or when to move onto the next step.
Generally, the second step in our day is heading to Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise on the west side of the park sometime in the middle of the morning. These two rides are not on Multi Pass, so it’s important to get on them before their waits increase. (Of course, if they’re low priority for you, just ignore me on this point.)
Figuring out exactly when to do this is tough (and on busy days the rides will have high waits immediately), but a good place to start is on the Jungle Cruise Thrill Data page and the Pirates of the Caribbean Thrill Data page. You can look at past dates to see how wait times are trending.
Disneyland Fantasyland Rope Drop
We’ll start with our preferred rope drop—the Fantasyland rope drop. I want to immediately say this rope drop works best if you have Multi Pass, and if you’re reading this post…I really recommend you get Multi Pass. You don’t read 1000s of words about as niche a topic as rope drop strategy unless you really care about planning a great day at Disneyland, and that task is made much easier with Multi Pass.
If you really don’t want to get Multi Pass, or if your Multi Pass strategy is going to be split between the two parks (i.e. you’re park hopping), then you’ll basically want to consider all of the rope drops discussed in this post to see which one targets the rides you’re interested in.
Beyond that, this rope drop is particularly good for two groups of people. First, if your goal for the day is to “do everything”, this is the rope drop for you. Yes, it starts with mostly “kiddie” rides, but those are a part of “do everything” and we think this is the best way to start the day with that goal in mind.
If you’re fine missing out on some things (particularly the rides in Fantasyland discussed in this section) then you might prefer one of the other rope drop strategies that we discuss next.
Second, this rope drop is great for families with small children, regardless of whether you have Multi Pass or are trying to do everything. You might still consider the other rope drop options discussed in this post because you might have different priorities than us, which is why we provide other good options. In particular, you might prefer the Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway / Toontown rope drop, discussed more below.
Now, onto the details of this rope drop…
If you have Multi Pass, we recommend your first pick be Space Mountain. If you can get a time that allows you about an hour for rope drop, that’s best (i.e. if the park opens at 8AM then an 8:45AM to 9:45AM time for Space Mountain is best). Because you’ll be focusing on Fantasyland to start the day, you want a Multi Pass pick that is popular and close to Fantasyland. Matterhorn is an okay alternative, too.
Entering the park, guests heading into Fantasyland will usually corral on the right side of the hub. Once the park opens, they’ll be allowed to access the park. Since we recommend starting with Peter Pan’s Flight, you’ll want to go straight through the castle—it’s the first ride on the right.
The point of the Fantasyland rope drop is to get through as many of the following rides as quickly as possible:
Peter Pan’s Flight
Alice in Wonderland
Dumbo the Flying Elephant
Snow White’s Enchanted Wish
Pinocchio’s Daring Journey
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride
Casey Jr. Circus Train
Mad Tea Party
Astro Orbitor (Tomorrowland)
That’s the order we recommend, too. Here are some notes on this list…
You might mix things up without Multi Pass. If you don’t have Multi Pass, you might start with a ride or two that have Lightning Lanes (that you can’t use) then come back to this list, either starting at the top or in the middle depending on waits. See “All Other Rope Drops” below. You might also head to Tomorrowland sooner (but still after a few Fantasyland rides) to squeeze in rides like Autopia, Star Tours, and Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters.
Two Fantasyland rides don’t make this list. King Arthur Carrousel is totally fine to squeeze in while you’re nearby, but it just rarely gets significant enough waits for us to prioritize it in the morning. I’d rather run the risk of missing it or waiting 10 minutes later in the day.
Storybook Land Canal Boats shouldn’t be a part of rope drop. Storybook Land Canal Boats is a long ride, and the wait is often longer than the morning posted wait time indicates. Once you get in line for Storybook Land Canal Boats, you’re conceding that you are done with “rope drop.” Assume that once you get in line for that ride, you’ll be exiting to higher waits across the park.
Rise of the Resistance Rope Drop
The Rise of the Resistance rope drop is straightforward. If you really want to prioritize Rise of the Resistance and you really don’t want to pay for the Lightning Lane Single Pass, then you can start your day with Rise of the Resistance.
If you have Multi Pass, you can make either Indiana Jones Adventure or Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run your first pick. I’d aim for a Lightning Lane time that starts 30 minutes after park open. Indiana Jones Adventure is more popular Lightning Lane and allows you the additional option of riding Smugglers Run via a short standby wait (if possible) or single rider (if available) immediately after Rise of the Resistance. Grabbing a Smugglers Run Lightning Lane first, though, ensures you’ll finish the two Galaxy’s Edge rides quickly, allowing you to come back to explore the rest of the land whenever you feel like it later.
Since you’re already out of your way for Rise and probably getting off Rise a bit into the morning, it’s fine to go straight to that Lightning Lane after the ride. (If you’re thinking “oh, I want to just start with Rise and then head to the Fantasyland rides you mentioned above” then my advice is just that you should be starting in Fantasyland and saving Rise for later.)
There are lots of reasons to not like the Rise of the Resistance rope drop. Rise is itself a long experience, easily taking up the first 30 minutes of your day in most cases. The rides closest to it are all on Multi Pass, making them less than ideal to head to second.
Rise historically has operational issues, meaning it might not be working to start the day. You’ll walk there, be told it’s closed, and then have to double back (probably to Fantasyland) behind the crowds.
Rise also has an Lightning Lane Single Pass that rarely sells out quickly. You’ll often have the chance to buy it even late in the day if you haven’t had the chance to fit it in yet.
Of course, all that falls by the wayside to people who care most about the fact that it is, in the eyes of most guests, the best ride in the park. If you’re a Star Wars fan, it’s probably the best theme park ride in the world.
All Other Rope Drops
This section is sort of “Disneyland Rope Drop without Multi Pass (but where you also really care about some Multi Pass rides).” If you have Multi Pass, it just doesn’t make a ton of sense to start with a ride that’s on Multi Pass unless you (1) want to ride it twice or (2) have some reason to think you won’t be able to ride it with Multi Pass, like you’re park hopping or leaving early.
Rather than go into these in the detail above, I’m just going to briefly discuss the major options here.
Mickey & Minnie’s Runway Railway Rope Drop
This rope drop made more sense back when Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway was an Individual Lightning Lane. Now that it’s part of Multi Pass (and only a middle priority ride on that service), it’ll make sense only if you don’t have Multi Pass and have some reason to prefer this to the Fantasyland rope drop. We’ll discuss more of this below.
Runaway Railway is in Toontown, in the far back (north) of the park. To get there, head through Fantasyland (exact route doesn’t matter much), past Storybook Land Canal Boats in the northeast of the land. Once you see “it’s a small world”, the path to Toontown is prominent on the left, and Runaway Railway is prominently past the fountain as soon as you enter the land.
If you have Multi Pass, you can grab Roger Rabbit’s Car-Toon Spin with your first pick and head there right after Runaway Railway. Now you’ll have two of the Multi Pass rides done (since Runaway Railway is also on Multi Pass).
As noted earlier if you’re a “do everything” group, kids or not, we think the Fantasyland rope drop is easily the best option. But if you have a small child and that rope drop didn’t appeal to you, this one might.
Over in Toontown you’ll be able to ride Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Roger Rabbit’s Car-Toon Spin, and Chip ‘n’ Dale’s GADGETcoaster with short waits to start the day. Then you’ll probably be able to meet some combination of Mickey and Minnie with minimal wait.
You’ve also got the new playgrounds in Toontown after you’re done with the rides, and there’s even a quick service restaurant—Café Daisy—if you need snacks or coffee.
This is a great way to spend a morning with your small kid. It’s relaxing and checks several major boxes—rides, characters, coffee, playground.
But in terms of ride count it basically means three rides here instead of seven or so in Fantasyland. Of course you always can get on those Fantasyland rides later, or you could head there as soon as you’re done with the three in Toontown, but if doing everything is your goal we’ve already been clear about the approach we prefer.
Indiana Jones Adventure Rope Drop
Indiana Jones Adventure is one of the best rides in Disneyland. If you’re someone who also visits Disney World, then Indiana Jones Adventure might be at the top of your list in Disneyland since it isn’t also at Disney World. To rope drop it, you’ll line up on the left (west) side of the hub in the direction of Adventureland. Indiana Jones Adventure is on the left, after Jungle Cruise.
Assuming you don’t have Multi Pass, you’re probably going to head to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and then Haunted Mansion. You’re also well placed to get on Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise (both not on Multi Pass) before those waits increase mid-morning.
Indiana Jones, Big Thunder, and Haunted Mansion are great rides and a wonderfully fun way to start the day, we just don’t feel like starting with them makes much sense if you have Multi Pass.
Space Mountain Rope Drop
A final option is to start with Space Mountain (enter Tomorrowland from the right side of the hub) and then probably Matterhorn. This leaves you in a nice geographic location—between Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and Toontown—with flexibility for where you go next.
Again, with Multi Pass this usually doesn’t make sense because these rides are both available on Multi Pass. Without Multi Pass, my opinion is that Indiana Jones—Big Thunder—Haunted Mansion is just a better set of rides than Space Mountain—Matterhorn, and we’d probably rather be close to Pirates of the Caribbean and Jungle Cruise mid-morning rather than trying to figure out what to squeeze in from Fantasyland / Tomorrowland / Toontown, though this will probably come down to personal preference.
Seasonal Option: Haunted Mansion Holiday Rope Drop
Usually from sometime in September to sometime in January, Haunted Mansion receives its Nightmare Before Christmas “Haunted Mansion Holiday” overlay. This vaults the ride to one of the most popular in the park and on Multi Pass, making it worth considering for rope drop.
In the context of this post, I’d group Haunted Mansion Holiday with the “all other rope drop” options. It will make the most sense to rope drop it if you don’t have Multi Pass, but you should consider it even if you have Multi Pass. In any case, it’s never going to be a bad ride to rope drop.
Continuing Your Day at Disneyland
Once you’ve gotten through the first part of the day, it’s time to take a breath and start planning the rest of the day at the park. For that, we’ve got a Disneyland One Day Itinerary post.
All Your Other Disneyland Planning Questions Answered
Don’t be overwhelmed by Disneyland planning! Take a second to check out our most important content and you’ll not only be an expert, but you’ll save big $$$ along the way.
Just starting out? Check out our Disneyland Planning Guide. When it comes to hotels, we’ve got reviews of all three Disney hotels: Disneyland Hotel, Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel & Spa, and Disney’s Pixar Place Hotel. As for tickets, check out where to find discount Disneyland tickets.
Know what to ride with our: Disneyland Rides Guide and Disney California Adventure Rides Guide. And just as important, know how to get on the best rides without the wait with our Disneyland Lightning Lane Strategy! For the complete guides to a day at the park, we have a One Day Disneyland Itinerary and a One Day Disney California Adventure Itinerary.
We always recommend arriving at the parks early. If you can get access to Early Entry at Disneyland and Disney California Adventure, you’ll have the most time in the parks. Even without those bonus hours, you’ll need to know Rope Drop Strategy at Disneyland and Rope Drop Strategy at Disney California Adventure.
Finally, before you head out, be sure to check out our to-the-point packing list, 10 essentials you forget to pack for every Disney trip. And if you’re interested in saving, there’s no better list than our 53 Ways to Save on your Disney trip from start to finish.