Zootopia 2 is now Walt Disney Animation's highest-grossing movie ever

Now, admittedly, there is a caveat or two here—the most notable being that, while Zootopia 2 has triumphed over 2019’s Frozen 2, it’s still trailing behind last year’s big Disney animated hit, Inside Out 2, which was produced by Pixar. (There’s also the matter of the “live-action” Lion King, depending on where that falls on your personal definition of “animated movies.”) It’s also, somewhat amazingly, not the highest-grossing animated film of the year period, because all box office considerations in 2025 have to be balanced against the mammoth success of Chinese feature Ne Zha 2, which, at $2.2 billion, became the fifth-highest-grossing movie of all time earlier this year.

What both of those last two figures underline, in fact, is that while the American box office is still just kind of shuffling along in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns, the Chinese box office has returned in force. Ne Zha 2 had an obvious homefield advantage there, of course, but Zootopia 2 is also drawing a huge proportion of its box office from Chinese markets. (A rarity since 2019, when Chinese audiences generally lost their fervent interest in Hollywood films.) It is, in fact, quite a bit more popular in that country than this one; the film, which follows up on the well-liked 2016 original, has brought in $333 million in domestic markets, but $560 million in China. (A huge uptick from the first movie, which did basically the exact same money in the States, but half as much in China.) At the risk of indulging in dangerous pun work, though, the first Zootopia apparently had a very long tail in China, where, among other things, Shanghai Disneyland is the only park on the planet with a land devoted to the film. And now it’s paying off, as the movie, directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard, is now the 15th-highest grossing film of all time.

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