Everything You Need to Know About Early Morning Magic at Magic Kingdom

12/28/2019

By Jennifer Stuart

Early Morning Magic is a hard-ticketed event at the Magic Kingdom. It is offered on select mornings and offers early entry into the Magic Kingdom, access to rides in Fantasyland and a buffet breakfast.

What it is:

Early Morning Magic is an early morning event that will grant you access into Magic Kingdom before it is open to other park guests with regular tickets. It is classified as a "dining event" as it includes a buffet breakfast but the real perk is VERY low crowd levels to enjoy rides in Fantasyland.

The crowds 15 mins before park opening

What you get:

Early Morning Magic crowds in Fantasyland

Early entry into Magic Kingdom
Pre-opening park access to select rides in Fantasyland
Buffet breakfast

Breakfast

Breakfast at Cosmic Ray's Starlight Café

Breakfast is included. In fact this event is booked as a dining experience. Breakfast is served from 8am to 10am. We recommend waiting to eat breakfast until later in the morning, so that you can make use of your time to get on the rides with a minimum of waiting. For all the details and pictures of what is offered for breakfast, check out our post Magic Kingdom Early Morning Magic Breakfast.

How to book it:

It's a bit trickier to find where to reserve this event as it is categorized under dining rather than under events. Follow this link to see where to find it on the Walt Disney World website.

Our thoughts:

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train - with no line up!

We really enjoyed doing Early Morning Magic. Although it is an extra charge on top of your park entry ticket, we considered it a good value considering how many rides we were able to do in such a short amount of time (at time of writing $79 for adults and $69 for children). Although I could only do Mine Train four times in a row without starting to feel ill the rest of the family was able to ride six times, plus Peter Pan three times, It's a Small World, Winnie the Pooh, and then were poised to ride Space Mountain as soon as the park officially opened. We followed that with a great buffet breakfast. It is worth checking which rides in Fantasyland will be included on the days that you are interested in as there is some variation due to refurbishments etc... For example our day was the first one that Peter Pan had been open for a month or so.

Strategy:

One of the first into Magic Kingdom

Be at the gates to Magic Kingdom early. You will want to arrive about 15 minutes prior to the scheduled opening, so plan your travel time accordingly (currently this is 7:30 but as always check your reservations as times can change). There is a separate gate for early dining reservations-- go to that gate and show them your reservation to get a special Early Morning Magic wristband (you will have to show this at various points to cast members to get into Fantasyland, to get on rides and to get breakfast).

Enjoy your walk down Main Street USA with relatively fewer people. It won't be empty but the crowds will be fairly light. A great time for a quick picture or two.

Cast members with signs will direct you to the correct entrance to Fantasyland. There are two places that everyone heads to right away Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Peter Pan's Flight. These are the two Fantasyland rides with chronically long lines. I would say that the majority of people head straight to Mine Train and this means slightly longer lines there for the first half hour or so. We still can't resist going on Mine train first-- and can get at least 4 rides in before I get too dizzy and we have to try something else for a bit. We had a blast walking straight on to all the rides. When does that happen for Peter Pan?! We did all of our favourites multiple times - including a second round of rides on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. So feel secure that if you are arriving right at the beginning and not eating until later, you will have lots of time to do rides.

Rope dropping Space Mountain

One last tip for making the most of your time - decide what other ride you really want to walk on that morning. Make sure you are done breakfast in enough time to walk to the edge of Fantasyland closest to that attraction and wait for the cue from the cast member there that you can walk to the queue for that ride (at rope drop for the rest of the guests). Our kids picked Space Mountain so we did the fast walk there. Another good choice is Buzz Lightyear or the Haunted Mansion if you go to the Tangled end of Fantasyland.

After getting in one more ride, we headed to breakfast at about 9:15am and had plenty of time to enjoy a filling breakfast before it was time for our first fastpass.

If you have done Early Morning Magic at Magic Kingdom we would love to hear about your experiences. Leave us a message in the comments below.

If you enjoyed this post you may be interested in some of our other posts about Disney World or Disney Cruise Line.