Advertisement

How should ‘Frozen’ really have ended?

Fans of "Frozen" will happily sing the film's praises whenever they can (no, literally -- they're going to sing). But the team at How It Should Have Ended has taken issue with what terrible parents the King and Queen of Arendelle were to Princesses Anna and Elsa.

It turns out the whole "estranged siblings" and "eternal winter" stuff could have been avoided if the King and Queen had exercised some common sense -- instead of, you know, imprisoning their daughters inside a castle for years.

But it turns out that the HISHE folks weren’t the only ones thinking long and hard about "Frozen's" ending.

Prince Hans revealed

During the film’s lengthy development, Disney went through many different adaptations of the famed Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. Early versions of the film revealed Prince Hans to be a villain much earlier in the story. Hans’s third-act reveal allowed Disney to play with viewer expectations that his kiss would be the "act of true love" to thaw Anna's heart.

“If we were going to make the ending so surprising, you had to believe at one point that Hans was the answer,” producer Peter Del Vecho said in a recent interview. “But then you want the audience to get ahead and realize he’s not the answer; it’s Kristoff. And only in doing that if you can get the audience to leap ahead and think they have figured it out, you can surprise them by turning it the other way.”

Evil Anna

“Frozen” co-director Jennifer Lee also recently revealed that another early versions of the story featured an outright evil Elsa, one who deliberately froze Anna’s heart.

“The whole second act was about Anna trying to get to Hans and to kiss him and then Elsa trying to stop her," Lee revealed on the Scriptnotes podcast in February. “You can’t make a musical with that... and so it had to change, but we loved the concept of frozen heart.”

Fan theories

“Frozen” fans also have their own theories about the film. One creative theory suggests that the death of Anna and Elsa’s parents is closely linked to another Disney animated move: 2010's "Tangled." Based on the fact that characters closely resembling Rapunzel and Flynn appear during “Frozen's” coronation scene, fans believe that the King and Queen of Arendelle were actually on their way to Rapunzel’s return celebration when their ship was lost at sea. If the King and Queen had survived to see the two princesses grow up, the ending of “Frozen” obviously would have been quite different. Thanks a lot, Rapunzel!

Did you like how "Frozen" ended? Let us know in the comments.