'Frozen 2' Isn't Confirmed So Let's All Exhale

I would like to take this moment to comfort everyone who got super excited over the prospect of a Frozen sequel. It's not off the table completely, but the main source of buzz around the potential film — one Idina Menzel, now and forever to be identified with Queen Elsa — would like everyone to know that she does not have much more information than you do. Menzel is backtracking on Frozen 2 , y'all; but did we really expect anything else?

Menzel triggered a flurry of excited headlines about the sequel to one of 2013-2014's biggest hits when she made a comment to The Telegraph about her hope of being involved in the sequel that made it sound like, hey, maybe they were officially moving forward with that movie and just hadn't gotten around to telling us yet:

Not the stage show — I don’t know what will happen with that — but the movie hopefully. We’ll see. I’m just going along for the ride.

Alas, Disney doesn't tend to do things half-assedly when it comes to one of their highest-grossing films of all time, and so Menzel seems to have simply been speaking from a place of hope. As she said on Today Monday when asked about the status of the sequel:

I have no idea. I just assume that because it's so successful that that's what they're up to.

Her assumptions aren't illogical: As Andrew Sims of Hypable points out: "Of course Disney is trying to put together Frozen 2. If they can wrangle together a compelling storyline worthy of the original, movie number two will happen... Like with Toy Story 4, Disney will wait until they have a story worthy of the screen."

Perhaps we can take a valuable lesson from Menzel's first comments and her subsequent admission: If a Frozen sequel is happening it will likely be announced in a far grander way than in a throw-away comment by one of its actors. We can speculate all we want, but there's nothing to suggest any of us (Menzel included) will know a damn thing until the precise second that Disney wants us to.