Six Flags Great Adventure Pushes Bakunawa to 2027

The hole left by Kingda Ka is going to stay open a while longer. Six Flags Great Adventure has now confirmed that Bakunawa, the park’s planned replacement for the fallen record-holder, will not make its 2026 debut and is now being pushed into 2027.

That matters because Bakunawa was supposed to be the next big line in the park’s skyline — the kind of project that resets the conversation around Jackson as soon as construction starts. Instead, the coaster has slid from a one-season wait into a longer pause, after earlier reports tied the delay to commissioning and testing issues. The result is another year of expectation without a launch date, even as Great Adventure keeps positioning the project as an all-new record-setter.

For coaster fans, this is more than a calendar shuffle. Great Adventure is still clearly betting on a marquee build to fill the void left by Kingda Ka, but the timeline now says that the park’s next headline attraction will be a 2027 story, not a 2026 one. The delay also raises the stakes: when Bakunawa finally does arrive, it won’t just need to be big. It will need to land cleanly after a drawn-out, very public wait.

The park has not said anything in the sources about a revised opening season beyond 2027, and there’s no fresh construction milestone to pair with the news. For now, the story is simply this: one of the industry’s most-watched replacement projects has been punted another year, and the skyline over Great Adventure will stay in limbo a little longer.