Zootopia 2 Set To Roar Past $500 Million At Launch? Inside Disney’s Biggest 2025 Box Office Bet

Disney is about to test how much gas is left in the family-animation tank, because Zootopia 2 is lining up what looks like the biggest domestic opening of 2025 so far. The twist: the real earthquake might be in China.

The numbers people are throwing around

• Domestic: tracking to $125–150 million over its first five days. In a year where October delivered the lowest monthly box office in three decades, that is not nothing.
• China: a social-media scooper who goes by @BoxOfficeMojo (file under semi-reliable) claims a $200 million-plus opening is on the table there, with a $500 million-plus global debut. Big if true, but that is a large grain of salt.
• Interest in China: Deadline says the movie’s "want-to-see" tally is at 2.3 million right now, reportedly higher than Avengers: Endgame at the same stage. The comparison floating around pegs Endgame’s opening weekend at $195 million; depending on which market/metric you look at, those Endgame openers swing a lot, but the thesis is clear: demand looks huge.
• Why this matters: since COVID, Hollywood’s grip on China has slipped hard compared to the 2010s, when big studio tentpoles (MCU and friends) leaned on that market. Exceptions exist — Avatar: The Way of Water still hit like a truck — and Zootopia 2 is aiming to be another exception.
• If the $500M global opening happens: the main challenger for biggest movie of the year would be James Cameron’s next one, Avatar: Fire & Ashes, which is also expected to be massive in China. Either way, that’s a Disney-vs.-Disney problem.

What the sequel is actually doing story-wise

The film picks up immediately after the first movie. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard are promising a heartfelt ride, which tracks for a Disney Animation sequel aiming for four-quadrant dominance.

Fun development wrinkle: earlier drafts apparently jumped ahead a few years, but the team scrapped that version. Judy Hopps herself, Ginnifer Goodwin, explained why they ditched the time skip:

"Well, there was another version that we did. There’s always like the story that we’re going to tell, but yes, there’s different iterations of that. And there was a version of the story that was going to pick up a couple of years after the end of the first story. And I think the realization was that there was too much time for change and growth off camera to have happened."

So how high can this go?

If that $200M-plus China opening pans out, the next bar people will start eyeing is whether Zootopia 2 can chase Endgame’s lifetime total in China. That would take serious legs, and Endgame benefited from pre-slowdown market conditions, but given the early interest numbers, it is not a crazy conversation to have.

Zootopia 2 opens November 26, 2025.