The Box Office Target Zootopia 2 Must Hit to Beat Demon Slayer and Ne Zha 2
Disney’s Zootopia 2 is set to roar into theaters November 26, 2025, with early tracking pointing to a $115–$150 million opening weekend, staking its claim as one of 2025’s biggest animated releases.
Disney is rolling out Zootopia 2 next Thanksgiving, and the early chatter says it could be a monster. We have a date, a cast, a plot hook, and some big, possibly eyebrow-raising forecasts. Let’s walk through what’s coming and how high this thing might fly.
What Zootopia 2 is and who’s making it
- Release date: November 26, 2025 (USA)
- Genre: Buddy cop comedy
- Directors: Jared Bush and Byron Howard
- Screenwriter: Jared Bush
- Cast highlights: Ginnifer Goodwin, Jason Bateman, Ke Huy Quan, Fortune Feimster, Andy Samberg, David Strathairn, Idris Elba, Shakira
The setup this time
Judy and Nick are back on the beat, reportedly chasing a reptile and going undercover to get to the bottom of it. Classic Zootopia vibes, just scaled up: more species, more disguises, more chaos.
The money talk: opening weekend and beyond
Let’s start with the early tracking. According to box office theory, Zootopia 2 is currently pacing for a $115-$150 million opening weekend. That’s a serious launch for an animated sequel, even by Disney standards.
On top of that, the same forecasting pegs the domestic floor at a hefty $394 million. Floor meaning: the low end of what it could finish with in North America if things go as expected.
The 2025 competition
This one isn’t walking into an empty marketplace. It’s set to collide with two other animated heavyweights in 2025: Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle and Ne Zha 2.
Context the source cites:
- Ne Zha 2 is credited with more than $2 billion worldwide. Yes, billion with a B. Massive, to put it mildly.
- Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle is listed with $638.1 million worldwide, including $129.8 million domestic (via The Numbers).
Can Zootopia 2 top them?
If Zootopia 2 lands around that $394 million domestic mark and follows a similar domestic-to-international split as the 2016 film, it has a very real shot at clearing Demon Slayer’s domestic take by a wide margin and pushing past its global number.
Beating Ne Zha 2 is another story. The first Zootopia made $1.018 billion worldwide in 2016, which is huge. To leapfrog a $2 billion-plus rival, the sequel would basically need to double the original’s global haul. Put bluntly: if it does hit that $394 million domestically, you’re still looking at roughly another $1.6 billion needed overseas and in total to climb past Ne Zha 2’s reported number. That’s a steep hill.
Why the projections look so bullish
There are a few clean reasons the forecasts are hot:
- Thanksgiving is prime real estate for family animation. If you show up with a four-quadrant sequel that plays for kids and parents, the corridor does a lot of the work for you.
- Disney’s marketing machine is, well, Disney’s marketing machine, and this one is getting the full push.
- Early test screening buzz is positive, which never hurts momentum this far out.
- Holiday moviegoing tends to support more than one family title, so competition isn’t automatically a dealbreaker.
Bottom line: Zootopia 2 is lined up for a monster holiday run, with opening numbers that could set the tone for the rest of the season. Cracking $2 billion is the moonshot; clearing the anime rivals is the more realistic bar. Either way, if these projections hold, this will be one of 2025’s biggest animated stories.
Zootopia 2 hits theaters November 26, 2025.