‘Zootopia 2’ fuels top 5 Thanksgiving box office haul
Disney’s “Zootopia 2” follows detectives Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde find themselves on the twisting trail of a mysterious reptile who turns the mammal metropolis of Zootopia upside down.
Disney
The Thanksgiving box office had enough tasty options to deliver one of the best holiday performances ever.
Led by Disney’s “Zootopia 2,” which collected an estimated $156 million, the five-day Thanksgiving weekend secured around $294 million. That figure won’t be finalized until Monday, when all of Sunday’s ticket sales are calculated, but would represent either the third or fourth best Thanksgiving haul of all time.
The fourth-highest Thanksgiving holiday box office is currently $291.3 million, which was generated in 2012 while the third-highest is 2013’s $294.2 million haul, according to data from Comscore.
While the 2025 Thanksgiving period at the box office was smaller than both 2018’s $315.6 million haul and 2024’s record-breaking $424.9 million, it still set records.
IMAX reported its best five-day Thanksgiving holiday weekend ever with $40.8 million in global ticket sales, 70% higher than the previous record set during the same frame in 2024.
“‘Zootopia 2’ and ‘Wicked: For Good’ delivered a phenomenal one-two punch for the Thanksgiving holiday — hitting the sweet spot for family audiences and sending our global box office soaring well past expectations,” Rich Gelfond, CEO of IMAX, said in a statement Sunday.
Disney, too, hit several benchmarks.
Largest animated box office ever
“Zootopia 2” had the highest global opening of an animated movie of all time, with an estimated haul of $556 million. It is the fourth-highest global opening of all time, the company reported.
“A staggering global result for ‘Zootopia 2’ as the Disney brand coupled with a PG-rated family film extravaganza and a beloved original installment powered the film to over a half a billion dollars worldwide,” said Paul Dergarabedian, head of marketplace trends at Comscore, told CNBC. “This film truly cracked the code on what family audiences around the world [are] looking for when venturing out to cinemas.”
Additionally, the animated sequel posted the second-highest Thanksgiving day and Thanksgiving opening for both the five-day and three-day periods. The current record holder is 2024’s “Moana 2” which tallied $221 million for the five-day Thanksgiving period and $135.5 million for the three-day.
Universal’s “Wicked: For Good” added an estimated $93 million to the domestic box office during the five-day Thanksgiving period, smaller than the $118 million “Wicked” picked up during the same period in 2024.
Still, box office experts expected “Wicked: For Good” and “Zootopia 2” to continue to snap up ticket sales in the weeks before Christmas and ahead of the release of Disney’s “Avatar: Fire and Ash.”
“This holiday weekend now sets the stage for a solid final home stretch of the box office year and with a great assortment of films on the way, including notable blockbusters and awards contenders … this is a welcome result in the wake of what has been a very tumultuous post-summer season for the industry,” Dergarabedian said.
Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal, which owns CNBC. Versant would become the new parent company of CNBC upon Comcast’s planned spinoff of Versant.
