‘Zootopia’ Tops The Box Office For Third Straight Weekend

Zootopia continued its hit performance at the box office this weekend, sitting at the top of the list for gross sales for a third straight weekend according to Forbes magazine. The Disney animated feature brought in $38 million, 26 percent less than it did last weekend. That sets Zootopia just ahead of Skyfall and just behind Avatar for third-weekend sales among movies that didn’t open with at least $100 million. It also pushed it past the $200 million domestic sales mark, which by the way is more than Finding Nemo did in three weekends.

Worldwide, Zootopia isn’t doing too shabbily either. It will wrap up this weekend with almost $572 million worldwide, over $100 million of that just this weekend. And Zootopia hasn’t even opened in Japan yet. The folks at Forbes are saying it isn’t outside the realm of possibility that Zootopia will pass the billion dollar mark in worldwide sales. Entertainment Weekly reports that it is also poised to surpass Frozen as Disney’s most successful non-Pixar animated film.

Check out one of Zootopia‘s trailers below.

Among the voices featured in Zootopia are Jason Bateman as Nick Wilde, Once Upon a Time‘s Ginnifer Goodwin as Judy Hopps, and Idris Elba as Chief Bogo. Zootopia‘s Judy Hopps is the first rabbit to join the police force and feels the need to prove herself to her fellow officers, something her parking duty doesn’t allow her to do. She’s a fast talker and volunteers to work on a mysterious kidnapping case at the center of Zootopia in order to do just that. The wily fox Nick Wilde is also working the case, and he is not going to make things easy for her.

Zootopia is Disney’s 55th feature film, and its entire cast is animals who are living lives that are familiar to us humans.

Zootopia is also performing well in China. Last weekend, Zootopia sales in the country were the two biggest days in China for an animated film according to International Business Times. At $113 million, it’s on track to surpass Kung Fu Panda 3 as the highest-grossing animated film ever released in the country.

Zootopia has been praised for its main female character, Judy Hopps. Disney has often been accused of not providing good female examples for young girls in their movies. That can’t be said of Officer Judy in Zootopia. She isn’t tall and curvy and provocatively dressed like Jessica Rabbit and she doesn’t need a Prince Charming like many of Disney’s female main characters do. Zootopia‘s Judy Hopps has an average body shape and wears a police uniform instead of a princess dress. Her dream isn’t true love, it’s a successful career. In the Zootopia scene in which Judy rents her own apartment, her satisfaction at having a place of her own is more in line with today’s values than many Disney films have been for young girls.

About a third of the Zootopia cast is female. Officer Judy’s voice is provided by Once Upon a Time‘s Ginnifer Goodwin, who has said of her character:

“If I had little girls, I would kill for Judy Hopps to be their role model. And I would kill for Judy to be my boys’ role model, too.”

Even Chief Bogo, voiced in Zootopia by the dashing Ildris Elba, says to Judy Hopps,

“Life isn’t some cartoon musical where you sing a little song and your insipid dreams magically come true. So Let It Go.”

Thank you, Disney.

Zootopia was released in the U.S. on March 4. The budget was about $150 million. Its soundtrack includes a variety of styles and includes songs such as “Try Everything” performed by Shakira, “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC, “Everybody Hurts” performed by R.E.M., and “All By Myself” by Eric Carmen.

[Photo by Tinseltown/Shutterstock.com]