The world has gotten tough these days.  Even news has become so heavily politicized and filled with subposition and misinformation that it's become hard to determine what's true and what's not.  You really know things are bad when that extends to Disney News.

A certain blog that has a history of inventing stories (here and here) posted an article entitled Nothing Has Been Filmed Yet for Upcoming “Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind” Roller Coaster at EPCOT, Adding to Construction Delays.  I'm not linking to it, but you can Google it if you absolutely have to. And while that headline is certainly catchy (CONSTRUCTION DELAYS!!??) It’s immediately false.

Films are critical pieces of Disney infrastructure for their attractions - but they aren’t so critical that Disney can’t build the screens that show them in advance of the footage being shot.  Even if for some reason Disney absolutely needed a film to be shot BEFORE creating the screens so that they could get a sense of scale and length, they can do this in house with stand-in actors temporarily until a final film is cut, which is certainly not uncommon in the film industry.

Later the article makes this bold claim: 

“In fact, the main story and the villain of the ride (or if there will even be one) weren’t nailed down yet when the attraction was announced. The decision early in development to cut away a fleet of audio-animatronic figures from the ride wasn’t just budgetary, but also seemingly a way to make sure the attraction could be built without figuring out exactly who or what might be in it when it opens. Attractions with projection-based scenes do have this luxury.”

Disney is a story based experience point.  They don’t just say “Lets put in a Guardians of the Galaxy Roller Coaster, and that ride needs to have 5 audio animatronics”.  They actually develop the story, the scenes, and the story beats.  Then that concept is taken and translated into rooms, animatronics, and videos.  Disney doesn’t approve attractions without knowing what the story is upfront. Now that's not to say that Disney doesn’t change or adjust the story of an attraction mid-development, or that items like animatronics aren’t ever cut for budgetary reasons, but things aren’t ever done with an unknown story.  Also, it’s not like Disney has announced that there was an animatronic that was part of the show that is now cut… so I’m not even sure where this is coming from.

So what’s the true story here? Well, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind’s scenes haven’t been shot yet (as per James Gunn's Twitter post) - and that MIGHT contribute to a delay in opening of the attraction if it was originally scheduled to be earlier - but we don’t know that because Disney doesn’t publicly release the attractions filming schedules.  Hopefully everything will be filmed, cut, and canned prior to Summer of 2022 which is when Disney currently plans to open the attraction.  Even if the shots aren’t filmed until December of 2021, there should hopefully still be enough time to produce them for the attraction.

Reading so much into so little does nobody any favors.