Every attraction at Disney's Hollywood Studios

This is the ride that replaced The Great Movie Ride inside the Chinese Theatre in 2020, and it is the single best attraction in the park for a family that includes somebody under 38 inches. The premise is simple: you walk into a movie theater to watch a new Mickey Mouse cartoon, the screen turns out to be a doorway, and you spend five minutes inside the cartoon aboard a runaway train car driven by Goofy.

A troupe of improvisers works Hollywood Boulevard in character as a fixed cast of Hollywood types: a public works crew, a starlet, a talent agent, a director, a security officer. They perform short scenes on the street, mostly unannounced, and they are the reason the front of this park has a personality that the entrance plazas of the other three Florida parks do not.

The facade of the Chinese Theatre is used as a projection surface for a rapid tour through Disney and Pixar animation, structured loosely around the idea that a single pencil line becomes everything that followed. It is a mapping show rather than a fireworks show, which means the building itself appears to fold, melt, and rebuild.

This is the live-action companion piece to the animation projection show, cut from Disney's non-animated catalog: adventure films, superhero films, pirate films, the occasional musical. It leans on big orchestral moments and works best if you have actually seen the movies, which makes it a much better watch for adults than for children.

The Skyliner station sits immediately outside the Hollywood Studios turnstiles, and the line from here splits at Caribbean Beach toward EPCOT's International Gateway, Riviera Resort, Pop Century and Art of Animation. It is free, it runs continuously while the parks are open, and it beats a bus in almost every direction it serves.

A small fleet of covered boats runs the canal between the Hollywood Studios dock, the Epcot resort hotels and the International Gateway at EPCOT. The full run to EPCOT takes about twenty minutes with all the stops, which is slower than the Skyliner but far more pleasant than standing in a bus queue.

Tucked down the short side street between Echo Lake and the Chinese Theatre, this is a two-room character meet: Mickey Mouse in a sorcerer setting on one side, Minnie Mouse in a movie-star setting on the other. You queue once and see both, and PhotoPass photographers are in each room.

Star Tours opened at this park in December 1989 as a straight simulator ride with one fixed film. In 2011 it was rebuilt from the ground up in 3D with a randomized structure, and that is the version you ride today. The ride computer assembles each flight from a pool of opening scenes, planet destinations, hologram messages and finales, which produces a very large number of possible combinations.

This has been running since the park's opening year and the concept has never needed changing: performers stage a series of action sequences as though a film crew were shooting them, then a director character stops and explains how each effect was achieved. It works because it takes the audience seriously. The show is genuinely teaching you about squibs, breakaway props, fire gels and fall pads while entertaining you.

Two royal historians of Arendelle narrate the story of the first Frozen film in a fast, jokey, heavily fourth-wall-breaking style, with film clips on a large screen and lyrics projected so the audience can sing. Anna, Kristoff and Elsa appear on stage at intervals, and the show ends with the song you already know, a snow effect and a lighting cue.

The Mickey Shorts Theater is a small, cool, almost always empty room that shows a compilation of the modern Mickey Mouse animated shorts strung together as a vacation story. It is not a headliner and it does not pretend to be. It is ten minutes of good animation in a chilled theater with almost no wait, which on a Florida afternoon is worth more than it sounds.

Olaf greets guests indoors at Celebrity Spotlight, the small building on the far curve of Echo Lake. The queue is short, the room is cool, and the meet itself is unhurried compared with the character lines at Magic Kingdom.

Rise of the Resistance is not a ride so much as a sequence of four rides wired together. You are recruited by the Resistance, board a transport shuttle, get captured by a Star Destroyer, escape through the ship aboard a trackless vehicle while stormtroopers and AT-AT walkers shoot at you, and finally drop out of the hull in an escape pod. It runs about eighteen minutes from the first pre-show to the exit, which is roughly three times the length of a normal Disney dark ride.

You board the Falcon in crews of six and are assigned one of three roles: two pilots at the front controlling left-right and up-down, two gunners in the middle firing at targets, two engineers in the back mashing buttons when the ship takes damage. Everyone can see the same forward view through the cockpit windows, and everyone's inputs genuinely affect what happens on screen and how much the cabin lurches.

Savi's Workshop is a paid experience rather than an attraction, and it is the most expensive thing a guest can do inside Hollywood Studios on an ordinary day. You reserve a slot, you pay roughly $250 plus tax as of July 2026, and you spend twenty minutes in a dim workshop building a lightsaber hilt from a tray of parts under the direction of a performer.

Droid Depot is the cheaper and more child-friendly of the two build experiences in Galaxy's Edge. You choose a chassis, pull parts off a moving conveyor, assemble them at a counter with a cast member's help, and walk out with a remote-controlled droid that reacts to elements placed around the land.

Nominally this is a store. Functionally it is the best free walkthrough in Galaxy's Edge, because the room is packed with props referencing the films and the shopkeeper behind the counter is a full-size animatronic who moves, speaks and reacts to a soundtrack of haggling.

The Play Disney Parks app turns Galaxy's Edge into a playable space. You can point your phone at crates to scan their contents, hack door panels, tune into ship-to-ship transmissions, translate the alien signage that is written throughout the land, and take on jobs from the three in-land factions.

There is no character meet building in Galaxy's Edge and no posted schedule. Instead performers appear in the streets of Black Spire Outpost, work an area for fifteen or twenty minutes, and move on. Rey and Chewbacca tend to appear near the resistance side of the land, stormtroopers patrol the marketplace, and the dark-side characters stage near the docking bay.

Slinky Dog Dash is a family coaster with two launch sections, a run of low airtime hills and a layout that climbs above the rest of Toy Story Land. It is not fast by coaster standards and it does not invert, but it is genuinely fun, and it is the ride at Hollywood Studios with the worst wait-to-length ratio in the park: two minutes of ride behind an hour of queue is routine.

You wear 3D glasses, sit in a car with a spring-loaded shooter, and rotate between five screens playing carnival midway games: throwing rings at aliens, cracking plates, popping balloons with darts, and so on. Your score displays on the dashboard next to your partner's, and that is the entire hook. It opened in 2008 and it works as well now as it did then.

Alien Swirling Saucers is a carnival whip ride dressed up as a toy playset. Saucers tow small rocket cars around two swirling patterns while music plays, and the whole cycle lasts about ninety seconds. It is the ride at Hollywood Studios with the lowest height requirement, at 32 inches, which is why families with toddlers gravitate to it.

Woody and Jessie greet together near the entrance arch, and Buzz Lightyear greets separately a short walk away. These are straightforward outdoor character meets with PhotoPass photographers, and the queues are usually far shorter than the equivalent lines at Magic Kingdom.

The Hollywood Tower Hotel opened in 1994 and it remains the finest piece of environmental storytelling at Walt Disney World. Before you get anywhere near a drop, you walk through an overgrown garden, a dust-covered lobby frozen mid-check-in, a library where a television plays a black-and-white introduction, and a boiler room. Every one of those spaces is built to a standard that most modern attractions do not attempt.

This is the fastest and most aggressive ride at Hollywood Studios. A twenty-four passenger train sits at a dead stop, a countdown runs, and then a linear induction launch throws you from zero to roughly sixty miles an hour in under three seconds, straight into a rollover loop. What follows is about ninety seconds of indoor track in near-total darkness with three inversions, all set to a soundtrack piped through speakers in your headrest.

This is a genuine Broadway-style production compressed to twenty-five minutes: live singers, a full costume department, choreographed ensemble numbers and a set that transforms twice. It has run at this park in some form since 1991, which makes it one of the longest-running stage shows at any Disney park, and the production values have been maintained rather than allowed to slide.

Fantasmic! is staged in a purpose-built amphitheater carved into the hillside behind Sunset Boulevard, using a lagoon, an island stage, three walls of water used as projection screens, fire effects, live performers, a floating barge and a very large dragon. It opened at this park in October 1998 and it remains the biggest single production Walt Disney World stages on a nightly basis.

The Sunset Showcase theater holds a wide wraparound screen and a physical Lightning McQueen vehicle on a rig in front of it. The show has him deliver a racing lesson that goes wrong, with the screen simulating a track, and it lasts about ten minutes standing.

This is a walk-through exhibition covering Walt Disney's life and the company's history, running from early animation through the theme parks. It contains genuinely significant objects: original artwork, awards, a scale model of a Disneyland attraction, letters, and the desk-and-office material that most Disney fans have only seen photographed.

This is a live show built for children roughly two to seven: a host leads dancing and games, Disney Junior characters appear, bubbles and streamers come out, and the whole room is encouraged to move. There is no seating in the traditional sense; families sit or stand on an open floor and children go to the front.

Launch Bay opened in 2015 in the old animation building and it has been quietly useful ever since. It is a large, cool, dim hall containing film props and replicas, a screening room, and separate rooms where you queue to meet Star Wars characters with a PhotoPass photographer.