If you are reading this, you have or are about to see the colossal box office figures come in for Zootopia 2, which has made an astonishing amount of money globally, including in China, where, for some reason, the series is enormously popular compared to others. It just set a single-day record there.
It is not a question of whether Zootopia 2 is a hit, but what scale of a hit it’s going to be. Nor is it a question of whether Zootopia 3 will be greenlit, but when it’s actually going to get here. We have some news on that front, along with the ability to do at least some rough calculations based on what we’ve seen with other Disney Animation hits before.
There’s a new Collider interview with stars Jason Bateman and Ginnifer Goodwin where the third film, which is teased at the end of Zootopia 2, is brought up (no spoilers here). They are asked “how can you not do a third one immediately?”
GOODWIN: I agree. I don’t think it would be as long. Hopefully. I don’t know. We’re getting up there.
BATEMAN: Do you mean the run time of it or the wait to do it?
GOODWIN: No, no, no, no, the wait to do the next one. I don’t know how much older they’d want us to be getting. I mean, we look amazing.
They then launch into a conversation about whether or not voices age as you get older, and that they’re going to Google that. They do, in fact, age as you get older, though truly aging out of a part is not mandatory, and at 56 and 47 respectively, even another decade for both wouldn’t really matter.
But would it be another decade? That’s Goodwin saying that she doesn’t think it would be as long between films as it was between Zootopia 1, which was out March 14, 2016, and Zootopia 2, out November 26, 2025. That’s nine years and eight months. As I said, a decade.
So “shorter” may not mean short, but we’ll use a few other points of reference. Disney animation hit series Frozen and Moana long gaps, but not quite that long. Frozen 1 and 2 had 5 years, 11 months separating them. Moana 1 and Moana 2 had an 8 year gap instead. If we’re doing Pixar, it was 8 years and 11 months separating. The Incredibles 1 and 2? Uh, well, that was 14 years.
So, if the space between Zootopia 1 and 2 was almost ten years, the “short” end we’re seeing here is about six years, as evidenced by Frozen 2. That said, these gaps are all first-to-second movie gaps, not second-to-third, and it’s possible that Disney assumed this would be a hit and will move more quickly to a third. But animation takes an extremely long time and Disney plans its slate years and years out. So, see you in the 2030s for Zootopia 3.