If you've watched Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2, then you know that the creation of the film, and really animated movies in general, are more in flux during their production then their live-action counterparts. Storylines, songs, and characters can all drastically change over time. As such, the documentary film crew that followed the last year of the production of Frozen II had no more idea where the movie was going than anybody else. The result of that is a lot of footage that was shot for the documentary series that was not used, which we'll probably never see.
I recently had a chance to speak with Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 director Megan Harding about the process of creating the series. Since nobody knew where the movie itself was going, Harding and her team simply did their best trying to get the footage and the interviews that they thought would make for good stories, but that didn't always happen. Sometimes threads that looked promising ended up going nowhere, but that meant that all the footage that had already been captured had no place in the final product.
I suggested that, since Disney+ includes an area for "extras," some of the best unused footage could go there, and it turns out, that was actually part of the initial plan, unfortunately, the little problem of a global pandemic prevented that from happening. According to Harding...
We were planning to try and put those [deleted scenes] together but then we had to evacuate our offices quickly and couldn’t take everything with us. We were still finishing post-production when Coronavirus hit so we basically had to take what we needed to, to finish the episodes, and leave everything else.
The documentary crew spent 115 days with the people behind Frozen II and the end result was a documentary series that's less than six hours long, so there is certainly more material than we would ever know what to do with. But you have to figure there are some great interviews that, while it might not have fit into the various stories that were told, are still worth seeing.
It's possible that we could see some of these deleted scenes added later, but it may also be that we missed the window. By the time this could be done, enough people may have moved on from Into the Unknown that it no longer makes sense to spend the effort. Of course, this is Frozen and the sequel's very existence, and its massive success, is proof that people haven't stopped caring about it yet, so maybe we will get to see some of this after all.
All six episodes of Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 are now available on Disney+.
