The 2024 EPCOT International Festival of the Holidays kicked off last week, marking the second full festival with CommuniCore Hall operating. Despite Disney’s promises that this new space would be a hub for EPCOT festivals, the space remains mostly devoid of decor.
CommuniCore Hall
After years of changes and delays, CommuniCore Hall opened this past summer, marking the end of the EPCOT reimagining. As we said in our initial review, CommuniCore Hall is a necessary functional space, providing extra food service locations and seating, but there’s nothing special about it. It’s basically a big gray box.
During the EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival, the hall was adorned with some decorations and sold festival merchandise. Disney also added progressively more seating.
With the Festival of the Holidays, we expected even more décor in the hall but found it to be as empty as ever. There are some Christmas trees at one end and table decals, but the only notable feature is the light-up gingerbread Spaceship Earth. The display is impressive and has a Celebration Countdown every 10 minutes (watch below).
But CommuniCore Hall still leaves a lot to be desired based on the original concept art Disney released.
While you could equate the gingerbread Spaceship Earth to the giant Figment sculpture in the depiction above, the space is certainly lacking the flurry of activity and ancillary displays that were essentially promised to guests. This is especially surprising based on the way that the Festival of the Holidays offerings for CommuniCore Hall were marketed, especially the “enchanting forest of twinkling trees” that has turned out to be 9 trees in a small cluster by the front entrance doors. At most, this would be a sad Christmas aisle at your local Target. Besides that, the art shows a number of items adorning the large walls in the building, but we have still not really seen a single item placed upon them in real life.
We are just a few weeks away from the start of EPCOT’s next festival (aren’t we always), with the International Festival of the Arts kicking off January 17 and lasting through February 24, 2025. This will hopefully give Disney another chance to finally impress guests with something, anything in this heavily criticized venue.
What do you think of CommuniCore Hall at EPCOT? Let us know in the comments and on social media.
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