Henry Faherty
Disney‘s newest hit “Zootopia“, released on March 4, is doing ground-breaking work at the international box office. Because of its beautiful animation, charming voice cast, and the mature ideas lying underneath its fun anthropomorphic story, the film has also received universal praise from critics, allowing the word-of-mouth to carry it even further. So Disney is clearly very pleased with the film’s success, and now they are already looking to the future with another big project: “Frozen 2”.
“Zootopia” crossed the $500 million mark on Friday, according to Variety, along with being projected to cross the $200 million mark domestically on Sunday. This type of success for an original story could mean that we could be seeing more like this from the studio in the future. And even though the film is sure to get a sequel soon, it’s still a rare point in its favor. But contrary to that, Disney is finally getting ready for “Frozen 2”, the sequel to the beloved 2013 hit that totaled more than $1.2 billion at the box office.
In a recent interview with Collider, the “Frozen” star, Kristen Bell, reports that everything’s almost ready to go:
“Not yet. We’re just about to. They’ve just written it and they’re still doing tweaks, but I think we should be recording this month. The story is great, and they exude quality. What I know about that whole team is that they wouldn’t just put something out to put it out. That’s why it took them so long to even announce that we were doing a second one. Generally when you have a first successful movie you want to make a second one. It took them a while because they wanted to figure out what story they needed to tell and what would be important and engaging and I think they found it.”
So it’s good the studio has taken its time in producing a second film, opposed to the typical Hollywood move of churning one out by the end of the following year. Even though production hasn’t started, Bell’s official return should please the film’s massive fanbase for the time being. There’s no official release date for the sequel yet, but it’s possible it could be quite a while before it hits theaters. That level of animation goes through a very long process before audiences ever see it. Although a Broadway adaptation of the first film is coming in 2018, so that may be all we get until further details are revealed.
There’s no telling if “Zootopia” will pass the snow adventure film at the box office, but it’s easily making it to the top of Disney’s biggest successes in recent years.
