One of the reasons Frozen was such a big success for Disney—outside of the incredibly catchy songs—was that it screwed with the classic fairy tale formula just enough to feel modern, edgy, and feminist. The real villain in the story about sisters rekindling their bond was self-doubt, after all. But, according to Entertainment Weekly, the original plan was to take the film down a more traditional route.
“So when we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters,” Peter Del Vecho told the magazine. “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 this version, Elsa was a Miss Havisham-type who turned herself nasty because she got spurned by the man she was going to marry, and Kristoff got a “Han Solo moment.” However, it’s worth noting that Frozen was always anti-shitty boyfriend: Hans remained a dick even as the rest of the story evolved. You can read the full extent of the scrapped plans over at EW.
But the most important part about all of this is that, if Disney had followed the original plot, there probably wouldn’t have been a place for “Let It Go.” Yes, we acknowledge that to some this wouldn’t be all that bad, but, please, think of Idina Menzel’s career.