‘Zootopia 3’ Will Officially Expand the Franchise in a New Direction

Zootopia’s city planners had a difficult enough assignment accommodating giraffes and mice in the same neighborhood. The result is a metropolis where the infrastructure is as much a part of the appeal as the animals using it. Every district invites another question about how this place works, and every new species makes the answer more complicated within Disney’s fantastical animal world.

That curiosity has given Disney plenty to explore across Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde’s cases. Their partnership remains the franchise’s main attraction, but there is still an entire animal kingdom to account for beyond its familiar residents. With Zootopia 3 in development, Collider’s Steve Weintraub asked Disney Animation Chief Creative Officer Jared Bush at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival how much of that world the next movie might reveal.

Bush confirmed his deep involvement in the story and offered an intriguing look at what awaits Judy and Nick. “This is something that is going to take a lot of time to get right,” he said. “I think with any movie set in the world of Zootopia, Judy and Nick are going to be at the very center of that. I think people know at this point that we are going to introduce birds into the world of Zootopia, and I think this may be the first time that we travel outside the bounds of Zootopia City itself.” Weintraub also asked whether the franchise’s success immediately prompted thoughts of another sequel, to which Bush answered:

“The honest answer is that on the very first Zootopia, Byron [Howard] and I had a great time, and a year in, we said, ‘We want to stay in this world and tell all kinds of stories.’ So, the idea that one day you’d introduce reptiles or one day you’d introduce birds are conversations we had 15 years ago.”

When Will ‘Zootopia 3’ Be Released?

The question of timing came up elsewhere in the interview, when Weintraub asked about Disney Animation’s long-term plans. Bush addressed the third movie while discussing how the studio organizes its upcoming movies. He explained:

“I know what those things are, but depending on how we’re doing, they can be shuffled. Obviously we’ve already announced we’re working on Zootopia 3. That could be in a few different years, depending on how that movie is doing, how the movies around it are doing, how our world is doing.”

Bush continued with a closer look at that planning process. “When I talk about a 10-year plan, I know roughly the movies that will be playing within those 10 years. The first five? I know those really well,” he said. “Beyond those first five, the next five, I have to know kind of what we’re shooting towards because, again, our movies take four to six years to make, so you have to have a sense of what that looks like.” He went on to explain that the flexibility is built into that schedule to allow the artists at Disney to see a path forward when they’re inspired to come work on a new project like Zootopia 3.

“I think it’s really important for a studio, one, to get people excited; two, a lot of our artists, they’ve always wanted to work on a Disney musical. ‘Oh, great! They need to know what that looks like in the future.’ Or they say — we got this a lot on Zootopia — ‘I came to Disney because of Zootopia. I really want to work on Zootopia 2.’ There will be people that, because of that, want to work on Zootopia 3. Great. We need to be able to tell them when that is so they can they can look at their life and say, ‘Okay, this is the movie that I want to jump onto.’ So, having a sense of that and being able to communicate that to the entire studio is critical.”

Zootopia 3 does not yet have an announced release date. Stay tuned at Collider for more.

Director

Byron Howard

Producers

Jared Bush