We have a trip coming up January 7 - 15 that we moved forward from last year. Ive been watching January to see when Parade times would get posted on Disney’s calendar and it appears that just happened. It doesnt show any performances of Starlight after Saturday January 10. Are they really not going to run it any evening the rest of the month? We are planning to go to MK on 1/8 so we should be able to see it, but we were hoping to see it on both of our MK days( the other is planned to be 1/15). We havent seen it yet, which means we havent seen a nightime parade at Disney in over a decade. I was so excited to see Starlight announced because growing up seeing MSEP many times and later Spectromagic i just dont feel like ive had a complete Mk day without ending the day with a nighttime parade and fireworks. Maybe they are taking it down to add some more elements because i had seen that Disney leadership had some concerns about show quality, but i hope its not a longer term strategy to take away Starlight during projected slower seasons going forward.
Anyone have any insight as to why its not on the schedule for the last 2/3 of January?
There’s always some kind of scheduling glitch that happens a couple of weeks into the new year, and this looks like part of the 2026 glitch. So it should work itself out soon? Yes, I know this year ends in 9 days, so there isn’t a lot of time left for them to fix it.
I was really surprised that they loaded the times for Jan 1 for the first time today. Agreed with what’s already been said above; I wouldn’t be worried about the lack of times showing up for your dates yet.
Yeah, I was really surprised that two weeks into December there were still no parade times for January including January 1st. There had been fireworks times for quite a while, but no parades. What seems odd to me is that there are Festival of Fantasy parade times for the whole month that showed up today with the Starlight times for the first 10 days of January. It seems strange that Festival of Fantasy would be loaded for the whole month, while only part of the month for Starlight, but maybe thats the sort of thing that could happen with a glitch.
FOF is a daytime parade, so it isn’t affected much by park hours. But park hours affect Starlight for how many showings and when. I agree, Disney is perpetually very late in publishing times for parades and fireworks.
It just doesnt make sense to me that if the fireworks times, which are also contingent on park hours, as well as the park hours themselves, have been on the calendar for a relatively long time now, why night time parade times would be delayed in loading because they are affected by park hours. It seems it would have to be either a data loading glitch, or Disney taking more time to make some decisions regarding the parade and its showtimes the rest of the month.
The second full week in January has Starlight showtimes now on the Magic Kingdom Calendar, so it appears those times are being loaded just a week at a time a couple if weeks ahead. There is just one show per night, except for on Saturday, as has been reported would be the case in January. The thing is, January really isnt less busy than a lot of times in the fall. I guess the expectations are just different.
True, but the fall has so many party nights that the non-party nights have so many people there just to catch Starlight and other evening things, making those nights extra crowded. That’s a factor in why they run it twice. We’ll see how well one Starlight parade showing works out.
That’s a good point. We used to enjoy going early November or early December, but we really dont like the complication that navigating the number of parties they have these days adds to planning that time of year.