As Hollywood emerged out of the COVID pandemic into a new, more challenging status quo, one of the big shifts it had to adjust to was the end of China’s love affair with big American blockbusters.
Once a growing market that could push tentpole films into the $1 billion-plus global range, audiences in Beijing and beyond became disinterested in Hollywood movies, turning their attention (and box office) instead to local films like “Hi, Mom,” “Full River Red” and the new record holder for the highest-grossing animated film ever, “Ne Zha 2.”
But this past weekend, Disney’s “Zootopia 2” did more than just turn back the clock to the 2010s with its massive $271 million five-day opening in China. In just five days, “Zootopia 2” passed the entire $245 million Chinese run of “Avatar: The Way of Water” to become the highest-grossing American film in the country since the pandemic. On Monday, the film became the first MPA film since “Endgame” to pass 50 million admissions with a $14.4 million daily total.
With this start, the animated sequel to the 2016 animal pun-filled Oscar winner is on pace to pass the $632 million total of “Avengers: Endgame” as Hollywood’s highest-grossing film ever in China and crack the country’s top 10 all-time list.
The question on everyone’s minds in Hollywood now is, how did “Zootopia 2” break so big in China? And can it happen again?
“Zootopia 2” has a long way to go in theaters, but after its $559 million extended global launch, it is not out of the realm of possibility that it passes the $1.45 billion total of “Frozen II” to become Walt Disney Animation’s highest-grossing film ever, before inflation.
If it gets there, it will be because the universal story of “Zootopia” — or “Crazy Animal City,” as its Mandarin title translates to — resonated with millions of Chinese moviegoers in a way that has endured changing cinematic tastes, and because Disney spent the past nine years cultivating China’s love for Nick, Judy and the rest of their world’s furry denizens with merchandise, the “Zootopia+” spinoff Disney+ series, and most of all, a wildly popular theme park area at Shanghai Disneyland.
In other words, this theatrical success is the result of nearly a decade of hard work maintaining a fledgling franchise, and isn’t one that Hollywood will be able to easily replicate.
Cultivating a fanbase
Walt Disney Animation’s chief creative officer, Jared Bush, has been involved in that cultivation since the beginning as co-writer of both “Zootopia” films and director of “Zootopia 2” alongside Byron Howard. He told TheWrap that at the sequel’s premieres in Shanghai and Beijing, he met many Chinese fans who told him how much Judy and Nick meant to them.
“We always hope that our stories resonate around the world, but I could see from the premieres for this film in particular that people can really see themselves in these characters and in the emotional journey that Nick and Judy go through,” Bush said on Monday, after the film’s enormous box office success.
In the first “Zootopia,” Judy leaves her small-town family to travel to the titular big city in the hopes of making a difference as the first rabbit to join its police department. That story of hopeful youth leaving home to pursue a career in the big city is a classic one in cinema and one that was personal to Bush as someone who grew up in the Washington, D.C. suburbs and who, like so many animators going back to Walt Disney himself a century ago, traveled to Los Angeles to chase his dreams.
But in 2016, that story was particularly resonant for young Chinese moviegoers trying to make their way in a country that was undergoing its own economic boom and rapid urbanization. With $236 million grossed, “Zootopia” was the highest-grossing Hollywood film in China in 2016, but compared to films like “Furious 7” and its $390 million total the year prior, it didn’t seem like an exceptional box office run at the time.
But “Zootopia” endured in the years that followed, with strong home platform viewing numbers and merch sales in China in 2017 and 2018. They were so strong that in 2019, Disney announced that “Zootopia” would make its first major entry into its global theme parks with an entire new section of Shanghai Disneyland, which opened in 2023.
There are versions of Tomorrowland, Pirates of the Caribbean and other staples of Disney’s signature Anaheim and Orlando parks in international Disney parks like the ones in Paris and Tokyo. But at least for now, the only place to see Zootopia come to life is in Shanghai, furthering the special connection fans there have with the movies.
Bush said it was a joy to work with Disney Imagineering turning the world his animators brought to the big screen into a tactile playground, so much so that several of the animal puns and gags that were created for the theme park ended up making their way into “Zootopia 2.”
“There was a barbershop for sheep where they style their wool and then bring the wool next door to make sweaters, and that was so brilliant that we used it in the car chase at the beginning of the film,” he said. “In the ride they designed for the park, Bellwether, the villain of the first film, dyed her wool purple, so we added that detail for the film as well.”
Leaning into the local language
Such visual playfulness has an appeal that transcends borders, but bringing that into reality in Shanghai allowed the pre-existing love for “Zootopia” in China to grow even more at a time when “Fast & Furious,” once wildly popular around the world, declined pretty much everywhere and Marvel, which had a foothold in China through “Avengers: Endgame,” was abandoned after films like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings” were not approved by China’s film board for theatrical release.
And when it came time for “Zootopia 2” to hit theaters, Disney also turned to another key element of any global hit to ensure that the film’s story about Judy and Nick overcoming their differences and fighting to protect a marginalized community resonated with Chinese moviegoers: localization.
Just as Jason Bateman and Ginnifer Goodwin have won over Western critics and audiences with their chemistry as Nick and Judy, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” star Chang Chen and veteran voice actress Ji Guanlin did the same in Asia, playing the two leads in the Mandarin dub of “Zootopia” — and they were brought back for the sequel. Like voice actors for all the dubs of “Zootopia,” they worked from a script that had to be significantly altered for each language for one simple reason: English puns like changing “before” to “be-fur” get lost in translation.
“We’re so lucky that we have collaborators worldwide that could not just translate our jokes and the story, but actually tailor it to the audiences,” Bush said. “And so you’ll get a wholesale different pun in different parts of the world that will work for that audience, and that, I think requires just a lot of people wanting to play in this toy box, understanding the tone and how to best convey to people from different cultures.”
It’s hard to say whether Hollywood could ever again generate another film that breaks through China’s general apathy towards its output like “Zootopia.” The industry is having a hard enough time getting American audiences to come to theaters for new ideas — no original animated film has grossed more than $200 million domestic or $500 million worldwide since the pandemic.
And if the answer to breaking back into China was as simple as talking animals, movies like “The Bad Guys” and “Kung Fu Panda 4” — the latter of which is the sequel to a DreamWorks film that was once the gold standard for Hollywood winning over Chinese moviegoers — would have been big hits. Instead, those films made around $50 million in the country.
The story of “Zootopia 2” in China, with its historic opening weekend, wildly successful theme park spinoff and more than 125 partnerships with Chinese and global brands, is an example of a Hollywood studio taking organic excitement around an original story and spending a decade sustaining and growing it in ways that never felt like a foreign company trying to pander to a culture it isn’t rooted in. And for Bush, it has been particularly gratifying to hear from Chinese audiences how invested they are in the relationship between the film’s two lead characters, Judy and Nick.
“I think the first and most important thing that we tried to make sure that we accomplished was to make sure that the story always revolved around the Judy and Nick dynamic, that relationship,” he said. “They are an imperfect partnership. There’s something about these two characters who are different, who start to worry that those differences are going to get in the way of this partnership, but work through that and see each other on a deeper level.”
Bush continued, “That’s something that we all do as human beings.”
