Q&A: Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Live Entertainment Reps Discuss Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run Updates and Making Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge “A Platform for New Stories”

With new information about the updates coming to Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Walt Disney World and Disneyland next year revealed at Star Wars Celebration Japan, Laughing Place got additional insight from Walt Disney Imagineering and Disney Live Entertainment about those changes and continuing to evolve Star Wars at Disney Parks.

What’s Happening:

Recorded in the midst of Star Wars Celebration Japan, the newly released episode of the Laughing Place “On Balance" Podcast includes Laughing Place’s Mike Celestino speaking to Walt Disney Imagineering’s Asa Kalama and Disney Live Entertainment’s Michael Serna. The duo discuss the Smugglers Run updates but also much more about the present and future of Star Wars at Disney Parks, including BDX Droids, working with Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni, and the ever-evolving nature of the frequently updated Star Tours.
During the conversation, Kalama remarked that when it came to offering an update to Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, “One of the things that we really wanted to make sure we were doubling down on in the second mission was making sure that every time you rode, it would feel fresh and different, and so that every flight crew truly felt like they had their own adventure."
As revealed during the Disney Experiences Panel at Celebration Japan, this will most clearly be represented by allowing the guest who is in the Engineer position to now actually choose the destination for your mission among the new options and, in Kalama’s words, “determine whether we're going to follow the bounty that takes us to Coruscant, the bounty that takes us to Bespin, or the bounty that takes us to the sort of wreckage of the Death Star around the moon of Endor," with Tatooine also among the four possibilities.
However, expect to see more specific variations beyond that, with Kalama adding, “In addition to having new locations to go to within each of those locations, there are also going to be a number of different paths that you can navigate down as well. So there's going to be a lot of reasons to come back and ride again, because every time you do, you're gonna get a totally different experience."
Timed to the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu in theaters, these new updates will debut at both Disneyland and Disney’s Hollywood Studios next year on May 22nd, 2026.
Though other Disney Parks attractions, including Star Tours, have variations on destinations, it stands out that the choice on where to go at the start will now be up to a guest. Explained Kalama, “The key impetus for us to allow that to be a guest choice is really at its core, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run attraction is about agency, right? We want to, as much as possible, allow you to make the choices about how your adventure sort of plays out. So it just seemed like an obvious and natural fit that this isn't something that we would select for you. It's not a thing that would happen randomly, but this is like the most pivotal choice that you could possibly make in a mission. So we, of course, wanted to give that to the actual guests in the cockpit themselves."

When asked how excited Star Wars fans should be for what they have planned for the future involving Star Wars at Disney Parks, Serna replied, “Oh, I think very excited. I think that we obviously are in a golden age of content with great stuff on Disney+ and films coming out, but I think that we're in a great golden age of our theme parks right now, with amazing things coming up that we're creating. We've established such an amazing base with Batuu and Black Spire Outpost that it just can grow from there in different ways."
Serna added, “We continue to have conversations about ways to keep things exciting for us and for our fans, and just know that there's so much passion and love about what Batuu brings to our fans or our guests that we just want to continue to keep growing from there."
Said Kalama, “Black Spire Outpost was always meant to be a place that new visitors come and stop by as they have to refuel on their way to the far reaches of wild space. And so we, as I mentioned before, have a backlog of super exciting characters and ideas that we've always wanted to bring to light for our fans, and [we’re] really excited again to sort of lean into this idea of this place as being a platform for new stories. And to Michael's point, as all of this amazing content sort of comes to life, finding new opportunities for our guests to interact with it, not just on screen, but in the real world."
Be sure to listen to Episode 11 of the Laughing Place “On Balance" Podcast to hear Mike’s full conversation with Asa and Michael and much more.
Check out more from Star Wars Celebration Japan here at Laughing Place, including at our live blog!

More From Star Wars Celebration Japan:

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