The Parks Mark your calendar before your calendar marks you. EPCOT will open an hour late on three mornings in early January 2027: Thursday the 7th, Saturday the 9th, and Sunday the 10th. Instead of the usual 9 AM start, the park opens at 10, with Early Theme Park Entry pushed to 9:30. Closing time holds at 9 PM, so the day isn’t shorter, just shifted. The culprit is Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend, when runDisney claims the resort for its biggest race weekend of the year. If your plan involved sprinting to Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind at rope drop or getting a jump on World Showcase, that plan needs a rewrite. This scheduling quirk wrecks an unprepared itinerary and barely registers for anyone who checked the calendar first. Planning your Disney trip? Download Lightning Brain from the App Store or visit lightningbrain.app to optimize every minute of your park day. Halloween weekend offered its own lesson in reading the schedule. With Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party taking over Magic Kingdom for the night, the park closes early to day guests, and that early closure turns Magic Kingdom into the calmest ticket on property. While Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom absorb the overflow crowds, Magic Kingdom sits quiet. The same logic applies on any night a hard-ticket event clears the park early. Extra Early Entry before a party night hands early arrivals a rope drop with none of the party-night crowd still lingering. Buying Lightning Lanes on these shortened days is often money spent solving a problem that doesn’t exist yet. Out west, Downtown Disney at the Disneyland Resort is stacking its holiday calendar with nightly Christmas snowfall, treasure hunts, and seasonal menu items running November through early January. None of it requires a park ticket, which makes it worth a stop even for guests not inside the gates that day. Looking further out, 2027 is shaping up as a real construction year for Orlando, with new Disney and Universal attractions, a new resort hotel, and the usual round of opening-date uncertainty that comes with any multi-park buildout. The Shows ABC’s “The Year: 2026” returns this December for its 16th installment, a two-hour recap of the year’s headlines and entertainment moments, hosted again by Robin Roberts with familiar ABC News faces filling out the hour. It’s a year-end ritual at this point, reliable in format if nothing else. Over at Lucasfilm, the Star Wars animation pipeline got a rare public walkthrough. At LightBox Expo in Pasadena, development executives Josh Rimes, Jane Riegler, and Matt Martin laid out how Star Wars stories move from idea to screen, a process that ranges as widely as LEGO sets to Darth Maul. For a franchise that lives and dies by its expanded universe, seeing the development team explain their own process in public is unusual and worth paying attention to for anyone tracking what’s next in animation. The Business Shanghai Disney Resort set a firm date for its third hotel. The Shanghai Disney Enchanted Star Hotel opens December 16, 2026, a 400-room property sitting next to Shanghai Disneyland Hotel with views over Shanghai Disneyland and Wishing Star Lake. Reservations open November 6 through the resort’s booking channels. A third hotel signals a resort betting on longer stays, not just more single-day visitors, and the overlook positioning suggests Disney wants guests paying for the view as much as the room. Disney and ESPN’s Super Bowl LXI tie-in is extending into retail. Mickey & Friends are getting NFL-branded apparel, collectibles, and fan gear as part of a season-long rollout tied to “We’re Going to the Super Bowl LXI,” giving fans in Los Angeles and beyond a Disney-flavored way to rep their team through the postseason. D23 is opening access to something new rather than nostalgic. Members get first access to Disney Shorts, a collectible series from Mintbrain launching in Beverly Hills on November 20. The concept reimagines Mickey’s silhouette as a canvas for other characters, which positions it as a standalone collectible line with Disney’s blessing. It remains to be seen whether this becomes a recurring D23 perk or a one-off experiment. The Details The Walt Disney World website quietly got a real upgrade. Search now behaves more like My Disney Experience, surfacing richer result cards with wait times, operating hours, and location matches built in. Small change, but it closes the gap between planning on the web and planning in the app, which helps anyone who still does research on a desktop before a trip. The Swan and Dolphin Food & Wine Classic is returning, open to hotel guests, other resort visitors, and locals alike, which keeps it one of the more accessible food events on property despite being a ticketed, private affair. Disney Dreamers Academy marked its 20th year, with 50 students from Central Florida walking the program’s purple carpet alongside community leaders and Disney VoluntEARS. Two decades running is a long time for any youth program to sustain, and the anniversary framing suggests Disney is treating this as a flagship community effort rather than a side initiative. For travelers weighing a Southern California trip against the usual Orlando run, one family’s seven-night SoCal itinerary mixed Disneyland with Warner Bros. Studios, LEGOLAND, and coastal stops, using points to offset cost. It’s a reminder that a Disneyland trip rarely stands alone the way a Walt Disney World trip can. Disneyland Paris, meanwhile, kept it simple for Halloween. Rather than a hard-ticket event, the resort ran a lighter special-event program included with regular admission, headlined by a full nighttime performance. Burbank, for its part, proved once again that the best Halloween decorating doesn’t require a park gate at all, with several home haunts delivering ticket-worthy scares for free. Keep exploring Catch more Disney Deets coverage or get the Lightning Brain app for real-time wait times and routing. Sources Disney Dining Inside the Magic Disney Fanatic Lightning Brain Disney Tourist Blog Mickey Visit Attractions Magazine MickeyBlog Laughing Place The DisInsider Disney Experiences Walt Disney Company D23 Chip and Co EYNTK Disney Parks Disney Parks Blog WDW Prep School DLP Report MiceChat Designed, trained, and directed by humans. Produced by Lightning Brain’s AI. Learn how we make this: https://lightningbrain.app/how-we-make-this Post navigation Imagineering Cuts Hit as Holiday Season Takes Over the Parks Skyliner Expansion Clues, Palo Opens to Kids, and Disney’s AI Voice Deal