How Disney is using Unreal Engine 5 to add major upgrades to Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run was a landmark moment for Walt Disney Imagineering when it opened in 2019. It was the first Disney ride that allowed guests to directly control their experience and interact with the story. But for the next Smugglers Run mission, the company is going one step further and making the ride feel a lot more like a traditional video game, complete with branching choices and sophisticated enemies.

WDI worked closely with visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) on the first Smugglers Run mission, with the latter using Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4 to create the high-fidelity graphics that make you feel like you’re part of an exciting intergalactic heist. Disney’s relationship with Epic actually goes back several years, when Lucasfilm decided to use Unreal Engine to build the virtual sets on The Mandalorian TV show.

To prepare itself for the ride’s new upgrades, ILM has been transitioning from UE4 to Unreal Engine 5.

“For the first mission, we partnered with a third party game developer that helped us create the gameplay code, and then we had Industrial Light & Magic produce all the game assets, and then work to integrate those things together,” said Asa Kalama, vice president and executive creative director at Walt Disney Imagineering, in a presentation to the press at Unreal Fest 2025.

“Now for the second mission, we’re doing this all with our Lucasfilm partners. So Industrial Light & Magic is producing the game assets. ILM Immersive [formerly known as ILMxLAB] is doing the gameplay programming. Our friends at Skywalker Sound are responsible for all of the audio programming and all the audio media production. So, it’s really great because they’re all literally in one building, and from an integration standpoint, it makes putting everything together much faster.”

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World puts you in control of the iconic Corellian starship from the Star Wars films. There are three roles to pick from (each fitting up to two people) in the cockpit: pilots, gunners, and engineers. Pilots maneuver the ship and are responsible for jumping to hyperspace, gunners attack enemy TIE fighters, and engineers help repair the ship and fire harpoons to steal cargo.

You earn galactic credits (serving as your team’s high score) for completing your objective and can increase that amount depending on how well you do as a team. Your performance will vary each time you’re on the ride, but otherwise the story in the original mission is strictly linear. The second mission, which Disney previously announced would star the Mandalorian and his adorable Force-wielding son Grogu, will offer far more replayability.

In this new experience, you’re being sent to the desert planet of Tatooine to capture a group of ex-Imperial officers and pirates — and since this is a bounty hunting mission, Mando and his child will help your crew track them down. At a certain point during the chase, your engineers will have to make a critical decision about which bounty to pursue: You’ll either visit the Cloud City in Bespin, the wreckage of Death Star II near Endor, or the sprawling metropolises of Coruscant.

“So every time you ride mission two, you will have the opportunity to have an entirely different branching experience,” said Kalama. “And then within each of the environments themselves, we’ve worked with our partners at ILM to develop levels that have considerably more branching [paths] so that even if you return to the same destination, there’s a new route or new secrets to uncover.”

He also said the development teams are “amping up the intelligence” of TIE fighters in this new mission in terms of how evasive they can be, and where and how often they respawn.

These ambitious new features are possible now that ILM is working with UE5. The team is also upgrading the computers that are attached to each of the Millennium Falcon cockpits with the latest generation CPUs and graphics cards (each computer holds eight GPUs).

“We’re excited about the additional headroom we have, because there were a lot of features or stretch goals in terms of visual fidelity that we ultimately had to dial back in order to make that trade off of performance,” said Kalama. “But we’re also very excited about having a lot more dynamic destruction, and that’s something that we really felt that we were a little bit more limited on in the previous version of the engine.”

Visitors to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge will have to wait until May 22, 2026 to try the new Smugglers Run experience, which coincides with the release of The Mandalorian and Grogu film in theaters.