Why Frozen 2 Was A Disappointment (Despite Disney’s Hard Work)

https://screenrant.com/frozen-2-movie-disney-sequel-disappointing-bad-reason/

Frozen 2 was clearly not a disappointment in a couple of ways: box office returns and the animation. It made $1.45 billion at the box office, ahead of Frozen’s $1.28 billion, both on a $150 million production budget. The animation was also stronger, the one area that undeniably benefited a lot from the extra time taken to get things right.

The rest of the movie doesn’t fare quite as well. It doesn’t pick up from any obvious ideas in Frozen for how to build the sequel. Frozen 2 tells a more ambitious story, going away from a traditional Disney movie structure to go after something bigger and more complicated. Among the main criticisms of Frozen 2 are that a lot of the introduction feels like it’s moving the characterization backward, it doesn’t hit the emotional depths of the first, and while the story is ambitious, it doesn't quite work in execution.

The elephant in the room with the story of Frozen 2 is that Disney made a movie with the same story two years earlier: Thor: Ragnarok. The big, thematic ideas of Frozen 2 are about the sins of your ancestors (Thor’s father Odin in Ragnarok, Elsa and Anna’s grandfather Runeard in Frozen 2), building a legacy through conquest and deception. There’s even the same basic resolution: the only way out is to destroy Asgard/Arendelle, though Frozen 2 lets Elsa save the kingdom at the last minute. These parallels aren’t subtle. While it’s hard to blame a movie for not nailing its premise as well as another, it’s also hard not to see when the parallels are so obvious.

There’s also a step down in the music. Frozen’s success can be credited in large part to the success of “Let it Go”. “Into the Unknown” and “Show Yourself” are solid songs but can’t rise to the level of the first movie's breakout hit. That was an iconic song that no one could avoid, while the equivalent songs in Frozen 2 never reached anything like that. They’re good, but not good enough to catapult the movie beyond just being a sequel to a movie that didn’t necessarily call for one.