‘Zootopia’ Becomes The Fourth Animated Feature To Reach $1 Billion Global Gross

By Amid Amidi | 06/06/2016 11:22 pm | 10 Comments

On Sunday, just two days before Zootopia becomes available on Blu-ray, the Walt Disney Company announced that Zootopia has squeaked past the $1 billion mark in global box office. The film, directed by Byron Howard and Rich Moore, becomes just the fourth animated feature to enter the $1 billion club, joining Frozen, Minions, and Toy Story 3. Zootopia’s tally on Sunday was $1,000,020,000.

Zootopia’s box office breakdown is $337.2 million domestically and $662.8 million internationally. The film’s performance has been one of the biggest surprises in Hollywood this year, outperforming pretty much everyone’s expectations and establishing a major new franchise for the company, which feeds into one of Bob Iger’s core corporate strategies. Zootopia sequels, TV shows, theme park rides, whatever…you can bet they’ll be delivered to fans at some point in the future.

The animation-heavy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows launched in first place last weekend in the U.S. with a soft $35.3m. That’s probably not the summertime figure that Paramount had hoped for, and comes in significantly lower than the $65.6m launch of the last Turtles film, 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The violent pizza lovers have picked up an additional $34m abroad.

The Angry Birds Movie slipped to fifth place in its third American frame with $10.2m. The film has grossed just over $87m domestically, plus $196.8m abroad, for a nearly $284m global gross. Rovio, the Finnish game developer behind Angry Birds, which paid Sony Imageworks to produce the film and is giving Sony 8% of the box office to distribute it, has the biggest financial stake in the film. They never revealed their expectations for The Angry Birds Movie, but by the end of its run, the film should at least break even. However, considering that the marketing blitz for the film pushed $400 million (that includes the value of promotional partnerships and doesn’t necessarily represent the amount that Rovio spent), their expectations for the film must have surely been higher than the low-to-mid $300 million range. The company had intended to produce the next Angry Birds film for 2019; we’ll have to wait and see whether they move forward on it.

Disney’s The Jungle Book fell to ninth place in its eighth weekend, adding $4.4m to lift its U.S. total to $347.7m. The global total is a remarkable $895.7m. Disney is not invincible though. Alice Through the Looking Glass has earned just $51.4m after two weeks, and will fall at least a couple hundred million dollars short (in the U.S. alone) of Tim Burton’s 2010 version of Alice in Wonderland.