2026 After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios: Dates, Details, Tips, Rides & Review

After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a hard ticket event with limited attendance and short wait times for Walt Disney World’s most popular attractions. This post shares our experience, info about the event, 2026 dates & details, tips & tricks, and whether it’s worth the money.

After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios takes place select nights from January 14 until September 12, 2026. This event takes place from 9:30 PM to 12:30 AM. In addition to that, After Hours attendees can get a head start on the fun by entering the park at 7:00 PM—a couple of hours before the event officially begins!

Reports from last year’s After Hours ‘season’ at Walt Disney World were largely positive from attendees. Crowds were sparse many nights and, aside from breakdowns, wait times were low. We’re expecting a repeat of this for the 2026 After Hours, as prices are up, there are fewer dates adjacent to busy weeks, and overall crowd levels have been trending down at DHS year-over-year.

There are also character meet & greets and surprise encounters during After Hours. This definitely is not a selling point, and previously wasn’t even something that was heavily advertised. It’s more ‘surprise & delight,’ since there are so few characters relative to other special events. Specifics have not yet been announced for 2026 After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, but here are unadvertised characters that previously appeared at the event:

• Duffy the Disney Bear
• Pinocchio & Jiminy Cricket
• Mary Poppins & Penguin
• Pinocchio & Meeko
• Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers
• Glam Daisy & Donald Duck
• Glam Goofy
• Minnie & Mickey Mouse

With that in mind, here’s what you need to know about the 2026 After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios…

The 2026 After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios will take place on:

• January 14, 2026
• January 28, 2026
• February 4, 2026
• February 11, 2026
• February 21, 2026
• February 25, 2026
• April 29, 2026
• May 6, 2026
• May 14, 2026
• May 30, 2026
• June 3, 2026
• June 10, 2026
• June 17, 2026
• June 24, 2026
• July 1, 2026
• July 8, 2026
• July 15, 2026
• July 22, 2026
• July 29, 2026
• August 5, 2026
• August 12, 2026
• August 19, 2026
• August 26, 2026
• September 2, 2026
• September 12, 2026

Deviating from typical hours, the May 30th event will run from 10:30 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. and the Sept. 12th event will run from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.

Event tickets are $155 to $189 per ticket, plus tax (prices vary by date). Tickets are now on sale and can be purchased by all guests. You can buy tickets online here.

Annual Passholders and Disney Vacation Club Members can save $30 per ticket to Disney After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Cast Members can also save on select nights. More details can be found on Cast Life Web or My Disney Today.

For 2026 After Hours, prices have once again on the high end, but not nearly as much as last year. Also, it’s nice to see AP/DVC/CM discounts, which are not offered for After Hours at Magic Kingdom.

Whether the event is “worth it” is obviously subjective. We’ve been saying for years that we view this as a quasi-VIP experience and think it’s one of the few upcharge offerings at Walt Disney World that is worth the money. However, at these new higher price points, it’s a really tough sell. (We’ll be voting with our wallets, and not doing it.)

With all of that said, most dates of After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios sold out last year, so it’s easy to see how they justified such massive price increases. We may not agree with value proposition anymore, but clearly, plenty of other guests do.

One of the hallmarks of the After Hours events at Walt Disney World is the unlimited ice cream novelties, popcorn, and bottled beverages. These are all included in the cost of this ticketed event–you simply walk up to outdoor vending carts stationed throughout DHS and grab a Premium Mickey Bar, Coca-Cola, or whatever else.

You can also purchase food and beverages at select dining locations, but this is typically a terrible use of the limited event time. Eat before you arrive or fill up on ice cream and other treats on-the-go during After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

During After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, attractions will include:

• Alien Swirling Saucers
• Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway
• Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
• Slinky Dog Dash
• Star Tours – The Adventures Continue
• Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance
• Toy Story Mania!
• The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror

Note that Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith is not on the list for 2026, likely due to its closure and reimagining. It’s unclear whether the new Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring the Muppets will join the lineup when it debuts in Summer 2026. Many other attractions that have opened partway through the After Hours season have not been added.

The operative question about After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is how many rides can you accomplish? Narrowing that a bit further, we assume most people reading this are concerned with headliners like Slinky Dog Dash–and how much time can be saved by paying to attend After Hours versus a normal day at DHS.

During the last After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, we did the following:

• Slinky Dog Dash (x3)
• Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster (x3)
• Tower of Terror (x2)
• Alien Swirling Saucers (x1)
• Toy Story Mania (x1)
• Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (x1)

That’s a total of 11 attractions, and we could’ve easily done more if efficiency were our lone goal and we didn’t crisscross the park as much.

We also ate about a half dozen ice cream novelties and had a few Cokes, each of which are also unlimited/included in the cost of admission during the event.

As noted above, After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios does not require regular theme park admission and allows entry as early as 7 p.m. As with the Disney’s Hollywood Studios version of the event, the special event begins 30 minutes after official park closing–at 9:30 p.m., and runs for 3 hours until 12:30 a.m. This means you can see Fantasmic or knock out a few less-popular attractions during the mix-in that starts before After Hours officially kicks off.

The last time we attended, we did Slinky Dog Dash as soon as the event officially began. Surprisingly, the line had already nearly or totally cleared of day guests. Unfortunately, everyone else who had arrived for After Hours had this same idea, so the line was roughly 10 minutes long. Incredibly short by Slinky Dog Dash standards, but our longest line of the night.

We probably could’ve done a bit more variety and fewer rides on the roller coasters, but those are the things with the longest daytime waits, so they were our focus. Just with the top two items, we conservatively saved 10 hours of time in line (give or take).

Of course, not many people are going to choose to wait in line an hour-plus for Slinky Dog Dash twice in the same day, much less six times, so the amount of time “saved” here is slightly deceptive. I mean, we also had countless Mickey Premium Bars, bottled water, and Coke–the value of which would’ve exceeded $50 were we paying out of pocket, but I would never buy a bottle of water at Walt Disney World in the first place, much less 6 of them in a day.

Throughout the night, the only attraction with any line was Slinky Dog Dash, which was at its longest at the beginning of the night. Tower of Terror also had a wait in the boiler room, but that’s a result of how it loads and not a function of crowds.

Everything else was a near walk-on for the entirety of the night. On Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, we had our own train once, and most rides on that were less than one-third full. The good news with both RnRC and Tower of Terror is that the pre-shows were optional. We watched each once (because unlike Flight of Passage, they’re awesome) and then skipped both on subsequent rides.

Despite this, Disney’s Hollywood Studios felt slightly busier than the After Hours at EPCOT event. Part of this is a function of park size, DHS being far more compact. We’d also hazard a guess that there were more attendees at the Disney’s Hollywood Studios event.

Going forward, we’d anticipate that attendance will increase at the After Hours as positive word of mouth spreads. However, even if double the number of tickets are sold, we still wouldn’t expect the event to feel significantly different. Most ride vehicles (save for Slinky Dog Dash) were being dispatched partially empty, so there was plenty of capacity to spare in those ‘walk-on’ wait times.

It’s also worth noting that none of Disney’s Hollywood Studios major entertainment offerings run exclusively during After Hours. This almost necessitates a return visit to the park a different day, unless you’ve already ‘been there, done that’ with all of the shows.

During that different day, we’d also recommend doing any attractions that are really lengthy from start to finish (Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run) or that don’t offer tremendous time savings during After Hours (Star Tours).

In terms of tips, our advice would be to start at the Sunset Boulevard rides and end with Toy Story Land. The latter was definitely busiest right after fireworks, and by the time that crowd cycled through Slinky Dog Dash a couple of times, it pretty much dissipated.

Our advice would be to plan your arrival to Toy Story Land for the second half of the event. At this point, your average cycle time (wait time plus ride plus exiting) for Slinky Dog Dash or Toy Story Mania should be at or under 15 minutes, and at or under 5 minutes for Alien Swirling Saucers or the meet & greets.

Another big piece of advice for After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios is to save Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance until near the end of the evening. This is going to be the reason that many or most people purchase tickets to After Hours at DHS, and a lot of them are going to prioritize it. The line will almost certainly be worst early-on, and significantly shorter in the last hour of the event.

Our expectation is that a lot of guests will go in with the expectation of doing “unlimited” rides on Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, with grandiose ideas of riding it dozens of times during the event. That is, until reality sets in.

In all likelihood, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance will start out with wait times of at least 30 minutes when the event starts (if not longer). People will endure that once or maybe twice, before moving on to other attractions. Others will keep riding, but burnout will inevitably set-in for a couple of reasons.

First, as great as Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is–and we think it’s the #1 attraction at Walt Disney World–it’s not incredibly re-rideable in the back-to-back-to-back (etc.) sense. It’s a great storytelling attraction, not one that delivers thrills or prompts a visceral reaction.

Second, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is long. It’s a multi-phase attraction, and it won’t be possible to skip all or perhaps any of the pre-shows during After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. We’ve found that even with perfect timing, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance takes 18 minutes to experience from start-to-finish.

That’s the absolute best case scenario. More likely, those attendees who line up early are going to sink almost an hour into one ride on Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Those who do two rides back to back at the start of the event are likely to eat up nearly 90 minutes of their After Hours time. Few will do 3 consecutive rides as a result.

Even if you did Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance from the moment you could enter DHS until the conclusion of After Hours, it’s likely you’d only manage about 10 rides on the Galaxy’s Edge headliner. So not exactly “unlimited” rides no matter how you slice it. (Honestly, that’s fine by us. We absolutely adore Rise of the Resistance, but I couldn’t do it 10 consecutive times. It would start to lose its luster and the magic would wear off. For me, twice during the evening is pretty much perfect.)

Accordingly, our strong recommendation is saving Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance until the very end. If you only want to do the attraction once, you can jump in line 1 minute before After Hours ends. This will effectively extend the event, as you’ll do your waiting in line and most of the lengthy attraction duration after the event has officially ended.

If you want to do Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance twice, consider doing it once around 90 minutes before the event concludes, then bounce over to Toy Story Land for a bit, and then return to Rise of the Resistance again 1 minute before After Hours ends. This is a better balanced approach, and also mitigates the risk of downtime (if you wait until the very end, there’s always a chance that Rise of the Resistance will be down and not come back up during the event–it still suffers from reliability and downtime woes).

We’d also recommend sticking to one area, doing that on repeat, and not returning. Even though Disney’s Hollywood Studios isn’t huge, the walk from Toy Story Land or Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge to Sunset Boulevard is a time eater.

We didn’t follow our own advice here, instead doing each a couple of times, grabbing some of the included refreshments, and then slowly meandering back towards the other while eating our Mickey’s Premium Bars or what have you.

After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios bears similarities to the Animal Kingdom event. As is the case there, this is a headliner-heavy event. Whereas you can go for variety at Magic Kingdom, the lineup here is more limited. To get the most value from a time-savings perspective out of After Hours at DHS, you need to be interested in riding Slinky Dog Dash repeatedly.

We think that’s really what the event comes down to. You certainly don’t need to ride them both a combined 10 times as we did, but you’ll want to do them more than a few times. If you’re a roller coaster junkie, this is a great event, and the fact that both of these headliners are near walk-ons (and that you can skip the RnRC pre-show) means you could do loops of both and get your ride counts into the double digits over the course of the night.

Conversely, if you’re only interested in experiencing everything once, arriving for Early Entry at Disney’s Hollywood Studios or even doing our Half-Day Disney’s Hollywood Studios Itinerary with a strong Lightning Lane game should be sufficient.

Whether you should do After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios comes down to your personal attraction priorities (are you a roller coaster junkie who wants to loop the two major ones here?), budget, and averseness to crowds. If you hate crowds and are willing to splurge on ~$175 per person tickets, After Hours at DHS will be a good event for you.

In particular, Slinky Dog Dash is a great attraction to do during After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, as it has no pre-show and normally is a top 5 attraction in all of Walt Disney World in terms of the posted wait time! DHS is also the most difficult Lightning Lane Multi-Pass park, so doing After Hours instead relieves that pressure.

Ultimately, there is no “perfect” approach to efficiently approaching Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Lightning Lane Multi-Pass works well, but not nearly to the degree that it does at Magic Kingdom–and it requires staying the whole day at DHS. Early Entry is another excellent option, but will only help you hit ~3 headliners. Showing up late is another savvy strategy, but it also won’t allow you to get everything done, let alone multiple rides on headliners.

This leaves the After Hours event as the best way to efficiently “do” DHS in a frustration-free way. Obviously, this comes with a very high price, so After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios isn’t going to be “worth it” for most or even many Walt Disney World guests…but that’s kind of the point. A limited capacity event keeps things manageable, and results in a more pleasant experience for those who can afford it.

We won’t be doing the 2026 After Hours at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, but if you have a big budget and don’t mind splurging, this event is fun and a good minimize stress and headaches that often occur at DHS. While we’d recommend alternative strategies for beating the crowds to budget-conscious guests, After Hours is a great option for those willing and able to splurge. We’d certainly recommend it over Lightning Lane Premier Pass for those who have extra money and want a quasi-VIP experience!

Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!

YOUR THOUGHTS

What do you think of Disney’s Hollywood Studios’ After Hours event? Planning on doing the 2026 After Hours at DHS to see how many times you can ride Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance in a single night? Is this something that interests you, or is the cost too high to justify? How many times would you want to do the two coasters in a single night? Do you agree or disagree with our review of the event? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!