Nobody was asking for a Zootopia sequel. Then it became Disney's highest-grossing animated film ever and hit 32 million streams in its first week on Disney+.
Nobody was asking for a Zootopia sequel. That's maybe the most interesting thing about how it turned out.
The original came out in 2016 — a sharp, funny movie that snuck in more social commentary than anyone expected from an animated Disney film about a bunny cop and a con-artist fox. It was great. It won the Oscar. And then Disney did what Disney does with its animated hits: waited about a decade and made a sequel.
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Zootopia 2 opened in US theaters on November 26th, 2025, and it hasn't really stopped making money since. As of last week, it's crossed $1.439 billion worldwide — Disney's highest-grossing animated film ever, and the second-highest-grossing animated movie in history. Domestically it's sitting at $428 million, the top-performing US film of all of 2025.
The film hit Digital HD on January 27th, Blu-ray and DVD on March 3rd, and landed on Disney+ on March 11th. That streaming debut was no quiet rollout. In its first week on the platform, Zootopia 2 pulled 32 million views globally, taking the number one spot with some room to spare.
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What made it work? Part of it is that the original directors returned and apparently refused to phone it in. The animation team built entirely new city ecosystems within the Zootopia world, and the researchers who helped design them did the kind of work that only shows up in the texture of a film — you don't consciously notice it, but you feel the difference between a world someone thought about and one that was slapped together.
Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde are back, and so is the thing that made the first film stick — the sense that there's something actually being said underneath all the talking animals.
It's not a perfect movie. But it's a genuinely good sequel — one built on craft rather than brand equity alone. The original directors returned and, by all accounts, pushed back hard against shortcuts. When $1.4 billion rewards that kind of seriousness, it actually tells the industry something useful.
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Sofia VargasSofia Vargas is a correspondent at dailytrends covering Entertainment. All articles are fact-checked and editorially reviewed before publication.
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