Frozen, the movie we all know and love (and the soundtrack we can all belt at the top of our lungs), was almost an entirely different film. Producer Peter Del Vecho revealed the deets on the original concept and ending of the film to Entertainment Weekly, and our minds are absolutely blown.
Initially, Anna and Elsa weren't sisters. They weren't royal. There was absolutely no sisterly bonding over building snowmen. "Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale," Del Vecho explains in EW's Untold Stories issue. "We started out with an evil female villain and an innocent female heroine and the ending involved a big epic battle with snow monsters that Elsa had created as her army…” Say what?!
The first intention of the film was to center it around a prophecy which foretold that “a ruler with a frozen heart will bring destruction to the kingdom of Arendelle.” Viewers would then spend a majority of the film watching Elsa as an evil villain, expecting her to be the ruler described in the prophecy. In the final showdown, Elsa would release her snow monsters, and Kristoff would come to Anna's rescue.
However, in a major twist of events, it would be revealed that Hans was actually the ruler described in the prophecy, triggering an avalanche to not only stop the snow monsters but also endanger Anna, Elsa and Arendelle. In the end, Elsa would use her powers to save the kingdom and unfreeze her heart (which she physically froze after being left at the alter, ugh).
Del Vecho and the minds behind Frozen decided that this ending wasn't satisfying enough. "The problem was that we felt like we had seen it before,” Del Vecho says. "We had no emotional connection to Elsa — we didn’t care about her because she had spent the whole movie being the villain. We weren’t drawn in. The characters weren’t relatable.”
Personally, we're so glad that the minds behind Frozen went with the ending where sisterly love and sacrifice were key. It was very refreshing to see a film where the women could stand up for themselves and didn't need a man to help save them!
