Usually, it’s great news when a popular theme park attraction gets any sort of upgrade. While it often requires rides to close for refurbishment to see significant updates, it’s nice when they reopen with a fresh coat of paint or even brand-new effects that make them feel newer than they truly are. When a ride doesn’t even need to close to be updated, that’s even better.
So it was nice to learn this morning that a popular Walt Disney World ride has received an update. It’s a minor thing, a fresh update to the in-ride photo that changes the look of the picture you get at the end of the ride. However, what makes the whole thing really strange is the ride that received the update, because it’s closing in just a few months.
Dinosaur Receives A Ride Photo Update Four Months Ahead Of Closure
This morning, Disney World stalwart and generally good guy, Drew the Disney Dude, dropped the info that a brand new ride photo was now available on the Dinosaur attraction. Under normal circumstances, this would be fine and not particularly newsworthy. But what makes it a bit wild is that we’ve known for a year that Dinosaur was on its way to live on a farm upstate with the now-defunct Muppet*Vision 3D and the Liberty Belle Riverboat, which is gone as part of Magic Kingdom's Frontierland overhaul.
The area known as Dinoland U.S.A. is closing to make way for a new Tropical Americas land, which will include attractions dedicated to Encanto as well as Indiana Jones. Half of the land has been closed since early this year, and we knew Dinosaur would follow suit early in 2026. A few weeks ago, it was confirmed that Dinosaur’s last day will be the last day of January next year.
Updating A Closing Ride Is Just Strange
This makes the decision to do…well, basically anything on the ride a little strange. Even though it’s unlikely that designing a new photo took a great deal of resources, any time and effort that it took would conceivably have been more useful anywhere else. We’ve seen much more significant elements of attractions, like the audio-animatronics on Splash Mountain, look pretty rough in the months prior to the ride being shuttered to be replaced by Tiana’s Bayou Adventure.
Dinosaur is going to close for good in a little over four months. Once that happens, the attraction will begin its conversion into a new ride based on Indiana Jones. It will tell a brand new story compared to the Indiana Jones Adventure found at Disneyland, but as that ride and Dinosaur use the same ride vehicle and track infrastructure, the expectation is that the Dinosaur replacement will still use the same style vehicles, and possibly the same track.
However, for now, you can get an updated photo and ride this ride before it closes.
