Ride the Millennium Falcon at Disneyland or Walt Disney World, and you might now walk away with more than a churro receipt — Disney and Epic Games have connected the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run attraction to a new Fortnite island called Smugglers Gambit, letting guests unlock in-game rewards by linking their MyDisney and Epic Games accounts.
The crossover, detailed by Los Angeles Times reporter Samantha Masunaga, means that how a guest's crew performs during the physical ride can translate into rewards once accounts are linked. It builds on an August 2026 promotion in which Epic Games and Disney began offering a Carbonite Fishstick Backbling for players who connect their accounts by October 31, 2026, according to Epic Games. The Smugglers Run ride itself has used Epic's Unreal Engine since it debuted at Disneyland in 2019, and the newer Unreal Engine 5 now delivers a more responsive, cinematic feel inside the cockpit.
A Partnership Years in the Making
Sean Shoptaw said Disney has spent many years working to connect its park experiences with an immersive game world, a framing that puts the Smugglers Gambit tie-in less as a one-off stunt and more as the latest step in a long campaign. Disney's Josh D'Amaro, who managed the Epic Games partnership in his previous role as parks chief, said the collaboration gives Disney an interactive, gaming-native environment to reach younger audiences. D'Amaro has also called the Epic Games collaboration a spoke of Disney+'s digital centerpiece, tying the gaming push directly to the company's streaming strategy.
Disney CEO Bob Iger described the Disney-Epic partnership as a way to reach more consumers and deepen audiences' bonds with Disney brands. That relationship dates back to Disney's $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games in 2024 for an undisclosed minority stake, part of what the two companies have described as a growing relationship that now includes plans for a Disney games and entertainment universe interoperating with Fortnite.
Unreal Engine's Reach Across Disney
Unreal Engine, the real-time 3D graphics technology that powers Fortnite's software, has expanded well beyond game development into automotive design, aerospace flight simulation, and media and entertainment production. Disney now uses the engine across its theme parks, film, and television work. The tool got a major boost in 2021 when it received the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade, which improved graphics quality and photorealism industry-wide.
Inside Disney's parks, the engine's reach now extends to animatronics. Disneyland debuted a new audio-animatronic figure in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride this past June, using Unreal Engine to render the pirate's facial expressions. On the production side, The Mandalorian famously used Unreal Engine for virtual interactive sets displayed on massive LED walls, a setup that eliminated the need for traditional location shoots and let the show film more than half of its first season through virtual production.
Betting on a Younger, Restless Audience
The push comes as Disney tries to keep audiences engaged amid increased competition for their attention, and the Disney-Epic integration is explicitly designed to entice Fortnite players to visit Disney's theme parks in person. Epic Games maintains a Los Angeles lab in El Segundo at NantStudios' virtual production facility, a sign of how embedded the two companies' technical operations have become.
Bill Clifford said cross-media experiences extending from standalone games into Fortnite, theme parks, and theaters represent the future of entertainment, a vision that lines up with what Disney and Epic are now building together. Not everything about that vision has gone smoothly on Epic's side: the company has had layoffs in 2026, though the dossier does not detail how that has affected the Disney collaboration specifically. Still, for now, the Millennium Falcon and Smugglers Gambit stand as the clearest example yet of Disney's bet that the path to younger fans runs straight through a game engine.
