Disney's Frozen originally had a totally different ending

The original version of Disney’s ‘Frozen’ was a pretty different kettle of fish from what finally made it to the screen, becoming one of the studio’s biggest ever hits.

And for the first time, producer Peter Del Vecho has revealed how the movie almost ended.

“With all the movies we were work on, eventually the film tells you what it needs to be and if you’re smart enough to listen to that, it leads you to a different direction than perhaps your preconceived notion,” Del Vecho told Entertainment Weekly.

“So when we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters. They weren’t even royal. So Anna was not a princess. Elsa was a self-proclaimed Snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil — much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale.

“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.”

In a more classic-sounding Disney plot, Elsa’s road to evil, Del Vecho details, was caused by being jilted on her wedding day, freezing her own heart so that she could never be hurt again.

Meanwhile, the movie would have opened with a prophecy telling how ‘a ruler with a frozen heart will bring destruction to the kingdom of Arendelle’.

And while it’s presumed that Elsa is the ‘ruler with a frozen heart’, the twist comes when it actually turns out to be Prince Hans, who, when threatened by Elsa’s snow monster army, triggers an avalanche that threatens to take out not only Elsa and the monsters, but also all the innocent folk of Arendelle.

It was at that point that Anna persuades Elsa to use her powers for good instead of evil.

“The problem was that we felt like we had seen it before,” Del Vecho goes on.

“It wasn’t satisfying. 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.

“Making them related led us to the idea of her living in fear of her powers. What if she’s afraid of who she is? And afraid of hurting the ones she loves? Now we had a character in Anna who was all about love and Elsa who was all about fear.

“That led to making Elsa a much more dimensional sympathetic character, and instead of the traditional good vs. evil theme we had one that we felt was more relatable: Love vs. fear, and the premise of the movie became that love is stronger than fear.”

The change in plot clearly worked. It went on to become the highest-grossing movie of 2013, and ninth highest-grossing of all time, making $1.3 billion and winning two Oscars.

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