New Epcot pavilions by Outside Company?
Today I was thinking about the countries represented in the pavilions at Epcot and while doing some research I tumbled on this site; Lionsgate international. They talk about new countries to be added at Epcot and how they will be involved choosing and building them, including negotiating with the countries that would be represented as new additions.
They are showing some artwork on Australia, the first new country they would add to the existing, and according to the website, expanding list. Also included in future projects would be Brazil, Greece, Russia, Sweden, New Zealand and Chile. The Disney company already had negotiations with other countries to be added, like Australia, but so far without results. One of the things coming to my mind was; why would Disney ask an outside company to do the negotiation for them and why would they ask another company to build these pavilions while they have the imagineers who do all the magic for them?…
…And it looks like I am not the only one as Jim Hill mentions in his article about this new company. (I found the Jim Hill article after I found the LGI site)
But there is more that doesn’t look right to me. When reading and looking at the website I found the following information…
We will soon begin negotiating a 20 year contract with the Walt Disney Company and assist the Walt Disney Imagineering group with the design and planning stages to the actual construction phases. We will create pavilions that will truly showcase the countries we have chosen.
Begin negotiations? There is no deal with Disney?? They state themselves that they will only begin negotiation for contract? So to sum it up, I understand that at this point all they have are some plans and ideas, some contact (on whatever level) to potential countries to be represented at EPCOT and a website. Hmm…”
Unfortunately, and in my opinion this is not helping them, their website is poorly designed too. Use of poor quality photo’s, text assigned on same line as the pictures, span tags, etc…
I could be wrong, and I hope I am for the people at LGI, but personally I don’t see this going right for them. If indeed they will work on these projects for Disney I wish them all the best and I will follow their progress closely as I love Epcot and all things happening there.
September 25th, 2007 at 8:53 pm
The content is no longer there, though it may still be available as a Google cache. The site is registered to an individual in Kissimmee, Florida, at an address that appears to resolve to somebody’s house. I’m going to guess that this was either a hoax or that the website owner was playing around with the site and innocently entered content that was picked up by the Disneyblogisphere.