Trust Me. If You Think You’re Being Smart by Rope Dropping This Magic Kingdom Ride, You’re Not.

Typically, if you want to ride a Disney World ride with the lowest wait it’ll have all day, we recommend rope dropping the ride in the morning.

Magic Kingdom

While some rides will stay low the first 1-2 hours of the park day, which is the rope dropping window, there are a few rides that you won’t want to get to first thing unless you can REALLY be one of the first people in line. Avatar Flight of Passage is like this, for example, and really always has been since its opening. However, now there’s another ride that we’re applying this same principle to — if you can’t rope drop it in the first few minutes of the day — DON’T.

TRON Lightcycle / Run in Magic Kingdom recently turned from requiring guests to join a virtual queue to experience the attraction to a standby line (with Lightning Lane Single Pass still available if you’d like to pay to skip the line). So now, instead of waking up at 7AM to try to snag a spot in the queue, guests can stroll up to the ride to experience it whenever they’d like!

TRON Lightcycle / Run

And since then, we’ve really seen wait times for this attraction jump up and down all throughout the day. Now things have evened out a little more, and we’ve seen a clear trend that shows many guests choose to rope drop this attraction in the first hour of the park day…which ends up being the highest wait time of the entire day.

That’s a long line!

So what this means, in a nutshell, is that unless you can be one of the FIRST people to get in line for the ride, don’t try it. Being one of the first in line could could look like staying at a Disney World hotel and getting Early Entry and getting in line at the BEGINNING of Early Entry, or entering the park at the regular time, but being at the park half an hour early to beat more of the rope drop crowds.

TRON Lightcycle / Run

This is especially true if you and your group aren’t early birds or prefer to stay at the parks later. From our research, it looks like other better times to ride the attraction are:

The hour AFTER rope drop (around 10-11AM), when everyone is staying away from the ride because it showed a 90 minute wait when they first stepped into the park
Around parade times (check your My Disney Experience App for when that will be happening!
If you want to ride at night, we suggest right before park close. However, this will be a busier time to ride overall since many people prefer to ride at night!

TRON

And if you really just don’t want to wait in line, grab yourself a Lightning Lane Single Pass reservation for the attraction, which you can do 7 days in advance if you’re staying at a Disney World hotel, or 3 days in advance otherwise! That way, you know you’re guaranteed to skip the line.