Disney’s Hollywood Studios always has good days to visit and ones to avoid, but that will be even more pronounced for the remainder of 2024. Halloween and Christmas seasons bring with them a roller coaster of crowds, with dramatic differences in wait times and attendance in choosing the best versus worst days to do DHS. This explains why, with lists of the least & most crowded dates in September through December, and a handful of red flag dates to avoid at all costs.
As with the Best & Worst Dates at Magic Kingdom in 2024, Party Season is the biggest factor in this list. Party Season is a big deal at Walt Disney World because it disrupts attendance dynamics and creates a “porcupine pattern” of wait times and crowd levels. In a nutshell, both Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party push attendance at Magic Kingdom much higher on the dates they’re not occurring and lower on days of the events.
This is nothing new–we’ve been banging the Party Season drum the last decade, at least. Magic Kingdom crowd patterns during Party Season are a key discussion points of our August through December crowd calendars. However, this post isn’t simply a ‘copy+paste’ of the Magic Kingdom recommendations. To the contrary, our advice for Disney’s Hollywood Studios is almost the opposite of what it is for Magic Kingdom!
As a reminder, we strongly recommend that readers visit Magic Kingdom during the day on Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party nights. In an ideal world, they’d have Park Hopper tickets and bounce to another park at around 4 pm.
The underlying rationale for this is that many day guests avoid Magic Kingdom on days when MNSSHP or MVMCP is held at night because the regular park hours are shorter and Happily Ever After fireworks are not shown. This results in significantly lighter crowds on days of the holiday parties when Magic Kingdom closes at 6 pm.
These same guests then flock to non-party days in Magic Kingdom. For visitors without Park Hopper tickets (which is most guests), visiting Magic Kingdom on non-party nights is the obvious, intuitive choice. For the same admission price, they get several more hours in the park and get to see the fireworks. That’s the explanation in a nutshell.
In theory, the dynamic should be very similar with Disney’s Hollywood Studios during its own truncated Party Season, which is largely just the Disney Jollywood Nights Christmas Party. However, there are several differences.
First, guests who opt to attend Disney’s Hollywood Studios on party nights almost certainly aren’t going to lose as many hours as those doing the same at Magic Kingdom. The castle park will close at 10 pm or 11 pm (or sometimes midnight!) on non-party nights. That amounts to staying an extra 4-5 hours later, seeing fireworks, and getting to enjoy the cooler evening hours in the park.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios will close at 10 pm at the latest (probably 9 or 9:30 pm most nights). It also likely won’t close as early to regular guests on party nights, meaning that the amount of lost time on a party vs. non-party night might only amount to 90 minutes to 3 hours. That’s still a good chunk of time, but it’s nowhere near as much. And it’s also not being taken from the park where guests want to spend the most time.
This brings us to the second key point. Disney’s Hollywood Studios really clears out in the final few hours of the day, whereas Magic Kingdom does not to nearly the same degree. This is relevant from the above perspective–guests won’t care as much about losing an hour or two there versus Magic Kingdom–but also from a strategic one.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios has the worst wait times, on average, of any park at Walt Disney World. But those times peak earlier in the day. Guests “hit a wall” and are more likely to bounce earlier in the day than they are from Magic Kingdom. This creates a sharp contrast in wait times, which are awful until late afternoon, and then plummet.
This dynamic is why we’re staunch advocates of a midday break on DHS days, or arriving and staying late to avoid hitting that wall. Doing DHS on a party day means essentially forfeiting that end-of-night slowdown, which won’t happen due to the party mix-in. (In all likelihood, it also means heavier crowds for Fantasmic, especially with the likelihood of only one performance on party nights.)
Finally, there are simply far fewer party dates at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Whereas Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party cover much of the calendar from October through December and are held a majority of dates each week during their peaks, there are a grand total of 13 dates for Disney Jollywood Nights. It’s never held on more than two evenings per week.
This alone means are 5 non-party nights per week to absorb the displaced crowds–to the extent they even exist–from Jollywood Nights at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. As a result, the contrast in wait times between party days and non-party days at DHS is likely to be far less extreme than at Magic Kingdom.
On this note, there’s also the fact that Jollywood Nights isn’t occurring in isolation. That’s obvious since we’re talking about it in tandem with Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party. But the practical consequence of all this is that people will be more likely to plan around MVMCP, adopting the intuitive strategy there, while ignoring Jollywood Nights.
Scheduling around the main holiday event is already a lot of work–juggling plans around two different parties in two parks will simply be too much for the average guest. They won’t bother worrying about the DHS event and will just visit when they visit. (If you’re reading this, you are not the average guest.)
With all of that said, you might notice some wiggle words in the above. This is a departure from our best & worst days to do Magic Kingdom, which expresses a high degree of confidence and calls this the easiest prediction we make. The difference, quite simply, is precedent. This has been happening at Magic Kingdom year-in and year-out for as long as we’ve been tracking crowds, so at least a decade. Probably longer.
By contrast, this is only the second year of Disney Jollywood Nights. The event was not particularly popular in its inaugural year, which could partly explain why it had a negligible impact on crowds. The bigger reason, though, is that it was essentially an After Hours event by another name, with very little impact on the operating calendar (less than an hour per evening). Day guests thus did not “plan around” DJN, since they had no reason to believe it would impact them. (It did, they just didn’t know it.)
This year, the start time of Disney Jollywood Nights is moving forward by an hour. We shall see whether it’s still the case that people don’t plan around DJN with the 7:30 pm start time. That might be pushing it too much and cause more disruptions to crowd dynamics a la MNSSHP and MVMCP, but we’re really skeptical that’ll be the case for all of the reasons identified above.
All of this is precisely why we do not recommend a zig when they zag recommendation for Disney’s Hollywood Studios like we do with Magic Kingdom. Average guests don’t care as much about missing (less) time at DHS as they do (more) time at MK. Attendance won’t be that much lower during the day before parties. Displaced crowds won’t be as big of a deal because there are fewer events.
The loss of those quiet nights is the bigger deal than all of the above. Those slower evenings will be lost–we can already say this with a high degree of confidence based on what we observed last year and on other hard ticket event nights–due to the mix-in. For those unfamiliar with it, mix-in is the informal term for the overlap between the regular operating day and time when guests with tickets to the special event are allowed to enter the park early.
Since these events are the only chance many attendees have to visit the respective parks, they arrive as early as possible to cram rides in before the party starts. This is why we recommend bouncing from Magic Kingdom at 4 pm on party days–because that’s when mix-in starts, and the park gets noticeably busier.
With Disney Jollywood Nights, mix-in will begin at 7 pm. Instead of wait times falling in the final two hours of the evening like normal, they will increase on DJN nights from 7 to 9 pm. This is a big blow–as that’s normally when we recommend knocking out Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge and Toy Story Land. On some evenings, it’s possible to do those entire lands in the last two hours of the night. That will not be the case on DJN nights.
Consequently, we recommend doing Disney’s Hollywood Studios on non-party days if you’re spending all day in the park and don’t have Park Hopper tickets. (More on the Park Hopping exception in the explanation below.) Now that we’ve explained the why and how of this, here’s the list of dates to avoid at Disney’s Hollywood Studios for the remainder of the year…
When to Avoid Disney’s Hollywood Studios – Fall 2024
- August 27, 2024
- August 29, 2024
- September 25, 2024
- October 2, 2024
- October 16, 2024
- October 23, 2024
All of the dates on the list above after After Hours, Extended Evening Hours, or other special events. The same logic applies to these parties as Disney Jollywood Nights, albeit to a lesser extent. On these evenings, there will be mix-in crowds that result in less of an end of the night slowdown. We’ve also observed ever-so-slightly higher daytime crowds on Extended Evening Hours dates.
When to Avoid Disney’s Hollywood Studios – Christmas 2024
- November 9, 2024
- November 13, 2024
- November 16, 2024
- November 18, 2024
- November 23, 2024
- November 25, 2024
- November 30, 2024
- December 2, 2024
- December 7, 2024
- December 11, 2024
- December 14, 2024
- December 18, 2024
- December 21, 2024
As for the best days to visit Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the low density of parties shouldn’t really disrupt our regular Best & Worst Days of the Week to Do Every Walt Disney World Park recommendations that much.
The one thing I will point out is that Jollywood Nights is held on Saturday and Monday nights for most of November. As you’re probably (hopefully!) aware, Sunday is the day in between.
Sunday is normally our favorite day to do DHS. The wait times data doesn’t fully support this, but we love Sunday nights at Disney’s Hollywood Studios because the tourists clear out like normal–but so too do the locals, and disproportionately so, since Monday is a workday–leading to lower actual wait times in the evenings. However, I would not expect this to be the case during November when Jollywood Nights is happening on Saturday and Monday nights. Sunday should be at least slightly worse as a result.
Statistically speaking, Wednesdays and Thursday are the best days to do Disney’s Hollywood Studios. That won’t be true on December 11 or 18, when the park is hosting DJN, but it should otherwise remain accurate in the months to come.
Another thing to note is that the above ‘worst’ lists are relative to the dates within each week or general date range.
As a general matter, all dates from August through mid-September are slower than the height of the holiday season. November and December have high highs and low lows based on holiday breaks, but are still, as a general matter, busier than August and September.
In other words, if you’re a local who has a wide open calendar and wants to pick an assortment of dates based upon absolute crowd levels and nothing else, aim for earlier. One of the August or September dates on our “avoid” list is still going to be better than the Wednesday or Thursday of Thanksgiving or Christmas weeks.
Additionally, Walt Disney World has thrown a monkey wrench into all of the above with the Free Park Hopper Deal. Honestly, it’s really difficult to assess the impact this promo will have. For one thing, there’s been almost no buzz about it–we haven’t heard from many people who are eligible and plan on taking advantage (mostly the opposite).
In theory, offering free Park Hoppers would normalize crowd levels to some degree. But I think it’s just as likely–if not more so–that this gambit backfires and is counterproductive. It’ll absolutely redistribute crowds to some degree, but in what direction? Free Park Hoppers may not result in higher attendance on early park closing days at all. It may instead simply result in heavier crowds on the late nights, as guests leverage Park Hoppers to go to the parks open earliest and latest.
Speaking of Park Hoppers, another option if you have one is following the opposite of our strategy: starting at Disney’s Hollywood Studios on Jollywood Nights dates, and then bouncing to a different around 6 or 7 pm for the rest of the night.
From a practical perspective, this might be especially attractive when paired with the zig when they zag strategy for Magic Kingdom during Party Season since Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party and Disney Jollywood Nights are always held on different dates. Meaning you could start at Magic Kingdom on a MVMCP day and hop to DHS that night; then do the opposite on the Jollywood Nights day.
To be very clear, I’m not suggesting this is an ill-advised strategy. It actually could be a pretty good one! The above lists and guidance were created from the perspective of those guests who don’t have Park Hopper tickets, and to explain why Disney’s Hollywood Studios is a different beast than Magic Kingdom during Party Season.
Ultimately, that’s why we do not recommend spending the entire day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios on Jollywood Nights dates–a departure from our Magic Kingdom zig when they zag advice. It’s also worth reiterating that this dynamic will not be as extreme at DHS as it is at Magic Kingdom. There’s a chasm in wait times on party vs. non-party days there for reasons discussed above. The contrast won’t be nearly as stark at DHS. If you can only follow our Party Season advice at Magic Kingdom or Disney’s Hollywood Studios for whatever reason, do so at MK. Without a doubt.
Again, Park Hopping adds a different dimension to this, especially when you pair two MK/DHS half days together. That should work really well. As is hopefully now clear, the purpose of this post isn’t really the list of dates. That’s really just a matter of pulling up the events calendar, which you could’ve done yourself in like 30 seconds. Rather, it’s helping you make more sense of this dynamic, and why Disney’s Hollywood Studios is different than Magic Kingdom during Party Season.
As always, we favor the “teach a person to fish” approach–helping you understand the why of Walt Disney World, so you can take the advice and apply it to your own circumstances, vacation dates, and so forth. Hopefully this wasn’t too confusing, and you now have a sense of which days will be best for you at Disney’s Hollywood Studios in late 2024.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
Does this convince you that you can, from an objective perspective, come out ahead by doing non-party days at DHS? Or, are you still unpersuaded, favoring the counterintuitive approach? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? 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!
