FOP wait time 180 min. at 9 am?

I’ll be going to Animal Kingdom on June 5th and plan to be there for the 9am rope drop (not staying on property, so can’t use EMH). I don’t have a fastpass for FOP and plan to ride standby. The current touring plan I made has me going around 2 PM for the ride with a 120 min wait. When I tried to move it to first thing in the day, the touring plan bumped my wait time to 180+ minutes. I realize there’s going to be a surge right at the beginning of the day and that there will already be plenty of people there from the EMH. However, does that seem reasonable that there would already be a 3 hour wait right at opening? I realize I’m just inviting speculation, but I was thinking that maybe if the data is based on last year around this time, when the ride was so new, maybe it’s using those same numbers for the ride this year, when it’s not quite so new, so maybe the actual wait time will be less at opening?.. Or is this just total wishful thinking on my part and it really will be 180+ minutes at 9…
Have any of you seen a discrepancy between projected wait times for this ride and the actual wait times on your touring plans?

I think it will be pretty high waits at 9am with 8am EMH. It is just nuts. I would consider riding later in the evening if you can. Many people report 1 hour waits or even less by hopping in line right before park closing. And keep checking for fastpasses! They may pop up even the day of your trip, so keep refreshing.

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We were there for around 8:30 during an 8 am EMM at AK last week and there was already an hour plus line for Na’vi and FOP. However, I actually was able to get an FP while in the park around noon for 2:30 that day for FOP for 3 people. Just keep modifying, modifying modifying.

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I do think with the initial mass of people coming in before RD, the wait time surges until a bit later in the morning then subsides slightly (but never really goes down too far.) I’d go with TP’s wait time estimates at this point.

If you can’t be at park early because off site, the best chance I’ve seen mentioned lately on chat is to get to FoP in the 20 minutes or so before close. Seems like people say the wait is somewhere around 60 minutes, but can be lower.

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Thanks for getting back to me. I was hoping to avoid the evening since they also extended the park hours to 10:30 and I’ll have little ones with me. I hope we’re all asleep by then. Maybe my husband or I can stay with the older kids for closing…
But I’ll definitely keep modifying to see if we can get something. I don’t hold out too much hope as we’re a party of 7, but you never know.
Many thanks!