‘Zootopia 2’ Isn’t The Overnight Success That It Seems

In less than a week Disney’s Zootopia 2 has broken record after record. The animated adventure with a cast of anthropomorphic animals grossed $156 million domestically giving it the second-biggest Thanksgiving opening ever in the United States. Over in China it had the biggest ever opening for an American-made animated film with its $271.7 million takings representing almost half of its $556 million worldwide total. Despite doing all this in just six days, the film is far from an overnight success.

Zootopia 2 follows up the original movie from 2016 which wasn’t just another Disney movie starring talking animals. The biggest difference with Zootopia was its ironic plot involving the titular city which is actually anything but a utopia. Instead it is rife with prejudice, fear and an underground conspiracy that fuels tensions between predators and prey.

It made the movie relatable to adults but that’s not all. Adding to the irony, the subterfuge is investigated by rabbit who was recently recruited to the police force and teams up with a literal crafty fox voiced by Jason Bateman. This unlikely pairing makes Zootopia seem like a buddy cop movie which also appealed to adults along with a plethora of in-jokes and cameos including one from pop-star Shakira who voices Gazelle, a singing Thomson’s Gazelle.

The movie’s cast of colorful cuddly animals tempted children through the theater turnstiles, especially in China. Famed for its obsession with cute characters, China generated a massive 34.5% of Zootopia’s $684.3 million international haul which itself was almost double its $341.3 million domestic tally.

This brought its total takings to $1 billion which reflected its 92% audience score on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. The icing on the cake was that the film went on to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature making a sequel all but inevitable.

It takes more than the wave of a magic wand to create movies like this as Zootopia’s co-director/co-writer Jared Bush explained in an interview with Disney yesterday. “It takes about five years to make one of our films, so we have to have ideas that we are so passionate about – ideas that we want to stick with as they’re going through all of their different iterations,” he explained. The studio didn’t want to wait that long to capitalize on the film’s popularity in China.

Disney’s Imagineers, the wizards who design its theme parks, soon started developing a land based on the movie for Shanghai Disneyland. Featuring a cutting-edge roving simulator set in the world of the film, the land swung open its doors in December 2023 and cast a powerful spell. The latest data from the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) shows that in the land’s first full year of operation the park’s attendance surged 5% to 14.7 million visitors. Its magic touch spread far beyond the gates.

Disney’s theme parks are the flywheel behind its entire business. The cycle begins when kids watch its films in theaters and then want to rewatch them at home on its Disney+ streaming service. After watching them over and over again they want to visit the lands they see on screen and pester their parents until they take them to a Disney theme park.

When they get there they are immersed in the lands they fell in love with in the films. Their emotion is at its highest when they have just been on the rides as they tend to end on a high note. Ingeniously, gift shops are located at the exits to subliminally convince guests to buy merchandise when they are in their happiest state. When they take it back home it reminds them of the good times they had in the park and reminds them to watch the latest instalment of the movie in theaters which starts the cycle anew.

This strategy is carefully planned by Disney and took nine years to play out from the premiere of Zootopia to the opening of its theme park land and the launch of the sequel so it was far from an overnight success story. It has already paid off as Zootopia 2’s $271.7 million ticket sales in China over the past six days alone have already eclipsed the first movie’s $236.1 million lifetime gross in the country. That only tells part of the story.

The success of Disney’s strategy can be seen even more clearly in the data below from Google which processed more than five trillion searches last year giving it a 90% share of the market.

The data comes from the Google Trends service which analyzes the popularity of top queries though the results don’t reveal the number of searches for a specific term. Instead, each point on the graph is relative to the others on a scale of zero to 100. A score of 50 means that there were half as many searches for a term on that date than there were when it hit 100 which represents peak popularity. In contrast, a score of zero relates to the lowest number of search enquiries during the given time.

The graph shows that searches for the term ‘Zootopia’ only peaked at a volume of 70 in 2016 when the first film was released. However, it hit 100 this week so Disney’s promotional push has clearly had a spellbinding effect. It is important to stress that Google is blocked in China so it is unclear how the search engine obtains this data. Likewise, it only covers the English spelling of the word, not the version in Chinese characters.

That said, these factors only affect the sample size, rather than the trend itself which is abundantly clear in the graph above. That may be just the start.

Zootopia 2 lags way behind Chinese production Ne Zha 2 which isn’t just the highest-grossing film of the year with takings of $1.9 billion, it has also dethroned Inside Out 2 as highest-grossing animated movie of all time as this report revealed. Zootopia 2 has got a long way to go to beat it though it has already done well to get this far in China given that geopolitical tensions and a growing preference for homegrown cinema have made it increasingly harder for foreign films to break through.

Zootopia 2 builds on the themes of the original with a story about the crimefighting fox and bunny going undercover on the trail of a mysterious viper voiced by Indiana Jones actor Ke Huy Qua. They are joined by even more cameos than there were in the original including appearances from animals voiced by the Rock, Robert Irwin, Ed Sheeran, Macaulay Culkin and Michael J. Fox who plays a fox of course.

It has enchanted audiences even more than the first movie as their Rotten Tomatoes rating is four percentage points higher at 96%. Reviewers too have lapped it up with the critics consensus describing it as “cleverly layering a thoughtful message onto another crackerjack caper while solidifying Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde as one of the most endearing buddy pairings in ages.”

Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst for Comscore, said that its strong ticket sales are “a great result and a big momentum builder for the box office as we head into the final four weeks of the year. He added that the sequel represents “a beloved franchise delivering what audiences were looking for around the world.” The same applies to theme park goers.

Shanghai Disneyland isn’t the only theme park with a Zootopia attraction. A 3D show themed to the movie can also be found in Disney’s Animal Kingdom at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. However, in stark contrast to Shanghai Disneyland, this is just a single attraction rather than an entire land and it only opened last month. If Disney had taken the same approach in its domestic parks as it did in their Chinese counterpart who knows how much more money the movie could have grossed.