Frozen producer reveals film's original ending was very different

It made more than $1bn (£799m) at the box office and delighted children across the world, but Frozen's producer has revealed the film nearly ended very differently.

In early drafts the key relationship between orphaned sisters Anna and Elsa didn't even exist, Peter Del Vecho said.

"When we started off, Anna and Elsa were not sisters. They weren't even royal", he told Entertainment Weekly.

"Elsa was a self-proclaimed snow Queen, but she was a villain and pure evil - much more like the Hans Christian Andersen tale" he said.

Del Vecho went on to explain that they initially envisioned Elsa as a scorned woman, who was "stood up on her wedding day and froze her own heart so she would never love again".

In the original draft the film started with a prophecy - which the audience would assume referred to Elsa - that "a ruler with a frozen heart will bring destruction to the kingdom of Arendelle".

Then in the film's final act Elsa created an army of snow monsters, causing the two-faced Prince Hans to trigger a massive avalanche, not caring that it put the whole of Arendelle in jeopardy.

"Anna realises Elsa is their only hope, so she convinces her to use her powers to save the kingdom" said Del Vecho.

"The twist is that the prophecy from the beginning is actually not about Elsa, but about Hans - he's the one with a metaphorical frozen heart because he's an unfeeling sociopath."

"Elsa's heart is then unfrozen allowing her to love again."

So why was the ending changed?

"The problem was that we felt like we had seen it before," said Del Vecho.

"We had no emotional connection to Elsa - we didn't care about her because she had spent the whole movie being a villain."

It was then that director Chis Buck and director and writer Jennifer Lee came up with the idea of making the two women related.

"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," said Del Vecho.

The relationship between the two sisters was then used to come up with the film's final twist, where it is Anna's selfless act to rescue her sister that thaws Elsa's heart.