Spin-Off Goals: Should ‘Once Upon a Time’ explore ‘Frozen’ route once more?
The fifth season of “Once Upon a Time” has been a little hit-and-miss for our taste, and when you look at its ratings, it also has lost a lot of the thunder that the show had at this point last year following an extremely memorable arc revolving around some characters from “Frozen.” Anna and Elsa helped solve a crisis in Storybrooke, Anna prepared for a wedding, and they eventually went on their merry way after the Snow Queen turned things around.
Does this have to be the last we see of this people, though? We know that “Once Upon a Time” has spun off before with the “Wonderland” show, so we are going to use this Spin-Off Goals article to state a case for why a series that is all about the “Frozen” universe is really something that we need or even want.
Why Frozen? – The first answer to that is simple: Popularity. If ABC wants ratings, why in the world would they not want to use Georgina Haig and Elizabeth Lail as Anna and Elsa in some capacity? This franchise is huge, and already has a sequel movie and a holiday special coming in the next couple of years. When it comes to the “Once Upon a Time” universe, it also makes some sense given that we saw Anna and Elsa return home at the end of season 4A, and they’ve never been heard of sense.
The idea – This one is really easy: Tell a TV extension of the “Frozen” story where Anna, Elsa, and Kristoff work to make sure the kingdom of Arendelle is as peaceful as possible. You can explore family dynamics, secrets, and other mystical elements in this world. With the original movie only going for so long, we know that there is a heck of a lot more that can be explored with some of these characters. You can air it while “Once Upon a Time” is on hiatus, or in the summer when kids would be able to stay up to watch it.
Will it happen? – Absolutely not. As fun as it is to speculate over this idea, there’s almost no evidence that we’re going to see something like this take shape … or that Disney would want to. They are so protective of the “Frozen” brand on the creative side that there’s no way they want anything getting in the way of their animated products, and we know that it’s somewhat ironic to say that they are “protective” of something that they have stamped on every piece of merchandise that they can possibly find. The world works in fairly strange ways sometimes; that’s the only thing that we have left to say on that.
Also, we personally probably don’t even really want a “Frozen” spin-off; we wrote this article more from the vantage point of analyzing commercial gains. If Disney was not so protective of the property, this is something that producers should consider in a split-second for the sake of getting better numbers.