'A first step, not a finish line' — Disney and Epic Games have connected Disney World’s and Disneyland’s Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run to a brand-new Star Wars adventure in Fortnite

Disney and Epic Games have been promising a ‘persistent, open and interoperable’ universe since February 2024, when Disney took a $1.5 billion equity stake in Epic Games, and Bob Iger called it the company's biggest foray into games ever.

Two and a half years and a handful of Fortnite islands later, we're finally getting something that behaves like what was actually promised: a Disney park experience that connects, mechanically, to Fortnite itself.

Most of what's arrived since that 2024 announcement has been a slow drip of standalone content rather than anything tied to the parks.

Disneyland Game Rush launched in November 2025 as a Creative island celebrating Disneyland's 70th anniversary, dropping players into mini games modeled on Space Mountain and Haunted Mansion — fun, but built entirely inside Fortnite, with nothing connecting back to an actual park visit.

A Percy Jackson: Siege of Monsters island followed that December, timed to the Disney+ show's second season.

On the parks side, Imagineering has been running its own parallel experiments with a lot of the same underlying tech.

Buzz Lightyear Space Ranger Spin at Magic Kingdom now uses Unreal Engine to power real-time scoring. (Image credit: Walt Disney Imagineering) And this past June, I exclusively got an early look at the next-generation animatronic system that debuted at Pirates of the Caribbean in Disneyland .

This pirate transforms into a skeleton in real time, driven not by traditional animatronic mechanics but by a projection pipeline built on Unreal Engine-based rendering tools.

It's proven to be a divisive addition among park fans.

Still, it's also more proof that the line between "ride system" and "game engine" has been blurring inside Imagineering for a while now, well before Fortnite entered the picture.

What none of those individual pieces actually did was talk to each other.

That changes now, though, as Disney and Epic have unveiled Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run | Fortnite .

It's not the most original name, but it essentially combines Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run — the ride inside Galaxy's Edge at both Disney's Hollywood Studios in Orlando, FL, and Disneyland Park in Anaheim, CA — with a new Fortnite island called Smugglers Gambit.

And it's the first time riding a physical attraction produces something you bring into Fortnite — not just a shared theme, but an unlockable reward tied to a specific action you took inside the park. (Image credit: Disney Parks) According to Julia Humphreys, VP of Production at Disney Digital Entertainment, who walked me through the thinking in an exclusive interview, that's exactly the point.