Families took advantage of the holiday and kids being off school to catch Zootopia 2 on the big screen.
One week after the musical sequel Wicked: For Good broke box office records with its release, a different franchise has surpassed it to dominate over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Families took advantage of the holiday and kids being off school to catch Zootopia 2 on the big screen, earning $156 million over its first five days on the 2025 movie calendar and an astonishing $556 million worldwide when adding in international earnings.
Zootopia combined with Wicked: For Good to rank as the fourth-best Thanksgiving of all time with approximately $293 million across all films
Released nearly a decade after the first Zootopia, which grossed over $1 billion worldwide, the sequel brings back lead voice actors Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman, and is produced on a reported budget of $150 million.
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The movie is currently sitting at a 92% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, which is marginally lower than the near-perfect 98% that the original continues to hold.
This has been an extraordinary year for animation so far, with Ne Zha 2 becoming the first animated movie in history to cross the $2 billion mark at the global box office, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle becoming the highest-grossing anime title of all time, and KPop Demon Hunters becoming the biggest original hit in Netflix’s history. You can watch Zootopia 2 in theaters, and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
It was internationally, however — and in China specifically — where most of its earnings came from. The animated sequel got $400 million from markets outside of North America to combine for $556 million worldwide. This gives it the best global debut of 2025 so far and the biggest premiere for an animated film ever.
Approximately $272 million of that came from China alone, where the franchise is especially popular, even boasting the recently opened Zootopia Land at Shanghai Disneyland, per Variety. Not only was Zootopia 2 China’s biggest animated movie opening of all time, it’s the country’s second-best premiere overall, falling only behind 2019’s Avengers: Endgame.
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In the U.S. and Canada, the sequel starring Ginnifer Goodwin and Jason Bateman as the voices of Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde, respectively, outperformed its 2016 predecessor’s first three days. Zootopia opened in March of that year with $75 million, compared to the $96.8 million that Zootopia 2 got from Friday to Sunday. The original went on to amass $341 million domestically and surpass $1 billion worldwide — not to mention its Oscar win for Best Animated Feature.
The original movie’s success was definitely a factor in how excited people were for the Disney sequel and a return to the titular land of anthropomorphic animals. It also helps that critical response was good — 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, an A on CinemaScore, and a 4-out-of-5-star ranking in CinemaBlend’s review of Zootopia 2.