📦 Toy Story 5 keeps rolling at the box office. After a $159.6 million opening weekend — the best of the year so far — the film has now crossed $200 million domestically, with a global debut already at $312 million. For comparison, Inside Out 2 opened slightly softer at $154.2 million domestic but held better in its second weekend, eventually grossing $1.699 billion globally to become the highest-grossing animated film ever released in the U.S.

💸 If you've been holding off booking that trip, now might be the moment. Disney+ Perks subscribers can save up to 25% on rooms with a 4-night, 4-day room-and-ticket package, bookable starting today (June 25) for select windows between late September and late December — and the deal even throws in a free Park Hopper add-on. Annual Passholders aren't left out either: they can save up to 30% on select rooms in the Disney Resorts Collection for stays from October 4 through December 24, with that booking window also opening today

🍪 End of an era for one festive favorite: Disney's Grand Floridian Resort gingerbread house will not return for the 2026 holiday season — or any future year — as Disney is permanently retiring the display. In its place, the resort's culinary team will create new miniature holiday displays. The lobby's recent remodel and the new Perch Lobby Bar have eaten into the space the gingerbread house once occupied. See the new bar here

🎄 Speaking of the holidays, we now have official dates: Walt Disney World's 2026 holiday season will run from November 13, 2026 through January 6, 2027, a slightly longer stretch than last year. Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party returns on select nights from November 8 through December 22, while Disney Jollywood Nights will run its longest season yet, extending into January for the first time. The EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays comes back November 27 through December 30, with the Candlelight Processional once again anchoring World Showcase.

🏛️ Finally, some bigger-picture context as America gears up for its 250th birthday: Disney Experiences generates nearly $67 billion in annual economic impact across the U.S., supports more than 403,000 jobs, and works with thousands of small businesses in all 50 states. Disney plans to invest $30 billion into its U.S. parks and experiences through 2033

🚢 Some quiet history is being made over in the Disney service marina just north of the Contemporary Resort. Disney is currently building a fourth ferry boat to carry guests between Magic Kingdom and the Ticket and Transportation Center, and thanks to aerial photos shared by @bioreconstruct on X, we're getting our first real look at the progress. Assembly has officially begun, with the hull and superstructure taking shape in the same marina where the retired Liberty Belle riverboat has been resting since Liberty Square's attraction closed to make way for Piston Peak.

Why this matters more than it might seem at first glance: this marks the first new ferry boat to join the Magic Kingdom fleet in over 50 years. The current three ferries — the Admiral Joe Fowler, the Richard F. Irvine, and the General Joe Potter — have carried guests across Seven Seas Lagoon since the resort's earliest days.

It's a slow build — it'll still be a long while before the new boat is seaworthy — but for transportation nerds (you know who you are), this is the kind of quietly significant infrastructure update that's easy to miss amidst all the headliner attraction news.

Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

Few Disney attractions have ever inspired an actual protest movement. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride did — and a quarter-century after its closure, it's still one of the most mourned losses in Walt Disney World history.

The character himself comes from an unlikely place. Mr. Toad first appeared in 1949's The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, a two-part package film. On the attraction, guests took on the role of Mr. Toad himself, careening through the English countryside and the streets of London in a period motorcar before ultimately meeting their demise in a railway tunnel — and waking up in a tongue-in-cheek depiction of Hell. Yes, really: an opening-day Fantasyland dark ride that ended with you going to Hell. Disney doesn't make rides like that anymore.

🚗 The Florida version had a twist its California counterpart never got. Mr. Toad's Wild Ride was one of Magic Kingdom's opening day attractions on October 1, 1971, and the biggest difference from the Disneyland original was that it ran on two separate tracks from two separate boarding areas, meaning guests could ride twice and get a genuinely different experience each time. Track 1 sent guests past cows and through a courtroom scene where the judge pronounced Mr. Toad guilty, while Track 2 detoured through Toad's trophy room and a gypsy camp before ending up in Winky's Tavern.

Both tracks, naturally, ended the exact same way — with a train, a door, and Hell.

⚖️ The closure announcement was as chaotic as the ride itself. Rumors began swirling in October 1997 that a Winnie-the-Pooh attraction would take Toad's place, and Disney didn't make it official until August 27, 1998 — barely two weeks before the ride actually shut its doors on September 7, 1998. Fans only learned the exact closing date from newspaper announcements on September 2, giving them less than a week's notice.

✊ That short notice sparked something Disney World had never really seen before: an organized fan resistance. A "Save the Toad" campaign sprang up, with fans printing their own shirts and posters and holding peaceful "Toad-Ins" outside the attraction, drawing supporters from across the country. Disney took the turnout seriously enough to station extra guards around the ride, even though the protests themselves stayed polite. It didn't save the attraction, but it's still one of the more remarkable grassroots moments in Disney parks history — Disney fans showing up in costume to peacefully picket a children's dark ride is the kind of story that somehow gets funnier and more endearing with age.

🏆 What replaced it softened the blow, but never quite erased Toad. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh opened on June 4, 1999, reusing much of the old ride's track infrastructure, though a significant portion was converted into a Pooh-themed gift shop.

🪦 And Mr. Toad never fully left the park. Eagle-eyed guests can still find him in two spots today: a small painting inside Owl's house showing Moley hanging out with Winnie the Pooh, and — more fittingly — a statue of Mr. Toad tucked into the pet cemetery just outside the Haunted Mansion exit, where he's been quietly memorialized ever since.

The Haunted Mansion: 999 Happy Haunts, Five Decades of Change

Twelve attractions have survived in some form since Magic Kingdom's opening day in 1971. The Haunted Mansion is one of them.

🏚️ The idea predates Disneyland itself. The concept for a haunted house attraction actually traces back to before Disneyland opened, when Walt Disney had just hired his earliest Imagineers — this project would go on to outlive him entirely. The ride spent over a decade in development and was one of the last projects Walt personally oversaw before his death. Walt tapped Imagineer Ken Anderson back in 1957 to develop a haunted house concept for Disneyland, but the attraction wouldn't open until years after Walt was gone.

👻 The creative team behind it famously disagreed on what kind of haunted house it should even be. Imagineers Rolly Crump and Yale Gracey were placed in charge of dreaming up the spectral effects, studying real reports of hauntings, Greek myths, and monster movies in a private studio at WED Enterprises. Their experiments got so unsettling that the effects reportedly frightened the overnight cleaning crews so badly that management told the crew to simply leave the lights on and the effects off after hours — The Imagineers wired everything to a motion sensor anyway, and the cleaning crew refused to ever come back. Disney legend has it the broader split was between Marc Davis, who wanted the Mansion warm and whimsical, and Claude Coats, who wanted it genuinely eerie — and the finished ride is essentially a compromise between the two visions, which is part of why it still works.

🦟 The Florida version was built bigger from day one. Disney built duplicates of all the Disneyland show pieces and animatronics simultaneously for the Magic Kingdom version, and decided the Florida attraction would run slightly longer and more elaborate, adding scenes like the library and music room that don't exist in California. Walt Disney World's Haunted Mansion opened on October 1, 1971 — Magic Kingdom's opening day — making it the second Haunted Mansion in the world, after Disneyland's August 9, 1969 debut. And because Liberty Square told an entirely different story than New Orleans Square, Imagineers built a red-brick, Dutch Gothic exterior inspired by the Harry Packer Mansion in Pennsylvania, rather than reusing the Southern plantation look from Anaheim

🪜 What's changed since 1971? More than you'd think. A 2007 refurbishment, nicknamed "The Re-Haunting," brought the floating Madame Leota and Constance Hatchaway the attic bride over from Disneyland, plus an entirely new Endless Staircase scene and overhauled audio in the Stretching Room. The Sinister 11 portraits were relocated to the load area to sharpen the story's pacing, and in 2011 the queue itself was transformed into a mini-attraction, complete with an interactive Decomposing Composer's Crypt. That same 2011 update swapped the classic mirror-based Hitchhiking Ghosts gag for digital projection — a change that's still debated by fans to this day.

📸 The most recent headline arrival took fifty years to show up. The Hatbox Ghost originally appeared in Disneyland's Haunted Mansion on its 1969 opening day, but the technology behind his vanishing, reappearing head wasn't convincing enough, and he was pulled within weeks. He finally returned to Disneyland in 2015, and made his Walt Disney World debut on November 30, 2023, as part of Disney's 100th anniversary celebration. Disney was careful to note he isn't counted as the 1,000th happy haunt — since he technically already belonged to the original 999, he's considered a returning resident rather than a new addition. His placement in the Endless Hallway, ahead of Madame Leota's Séance Circle, sparked its own minor fan debate over whether the timeline of the house's story still makes sense (apparation before the haunts are summoned) — though Imagineers have explained that, as an "unhappy haunt," he simply comes and goes wherever and whenever he pleases.

🪦 And yet, so much has stayed exactly the same. The tombstones outside the attraction are still named after the actual Imagineers who built it — "Master Gracey" for Yale Gracey, and tributes to Marc Davis and Claude Coats among them — and the singing busts in the graveyard still belt out "Grim Grinning Ghosts," written by Imagineer X Atencio, who also penned the lyrics to "Yo Ho (A Pirate's Life for Me)."