Fanfiction, but it's a comic strip with stick figures, but they're triangles. pronouns he/him. being an incomplete mirror of heroofthreefaces.tumblr.com
As of the time of writing this, Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 55th feature, Zootopia, has reached the $970 million mark at the global box office, and has a good chance at hitting $1 billion globally, based on its leggy performance in the slow-burn Japanese market, and the fact it’s still lingering in the US top ten, two and a half months into its $330 million+ domestic run. Passing the $1 billion milestone will put it among the top 25 highest-grossing movies of all time, as well as making it the fourth-biggest animated film ever and the third highest-grossing film not to be based on any pre-existing material (or second, if you count Titanic as being “based on pre-existing material”). Combined with its 98% score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s fair to say Byron Howard and Rich Moore’s talking animal movie has gone down pretty bloody well.
One of the nicest things about the overwhelming success of Zootopia is that it didn’t feel particularly pre-ordained. Of the three films that are likely to remain above it in the ranking of top animated movies, both Minions from Illumination and Toy Story 3 from Pixar were clearly blockbusters by design, positioned and merchandised to hoover up dollars and goodwill that would inevitably be there; global champ Frozen, meanwhile, despite being a lightning-in-a-bottle freak phenomenon, can also be said to have benefited from some canny Christmas scheduling by Disney to align with its icy theme and the out-of-school availability of its young core audience. Zootopia, by contrast, was positioned as more of a schedule-filler, slotted into an early March family-movie gap between DreamWorks’ Kung Fu Panda 3 in February and Disney’s own remake of The Jungle Book in mid-April. It seemed designed to get in there, hoover up around $200 million in the US/$600 million worldwide – as has been standard for non-Frozen Disney movies in recent years – and be out of cinemas by the time summer blockbuster season got started in May. The fact that Zootopia’s home media debut is coming on June 7th – a mere three months after its cinema release – suggests that Disney had no idea they had a high-stamina $1 billion breakout on its hands; it’s tempting to wonder whether it could’ve climbed even higher if the studio hadn’t aggressively scheduled Jungle Book and Captain America: Civil War in such close proximity afterwards, evidently on the assumption that Zootopia would be done long before then.
Having lowballed the film’s potential in the lead-up to its release, the onus now falls on Disney to make sure it learns the right lessons from Zootopia, and give the film the legacy it deserves. Because make no mistake: this noir-tinged anthropomorphic police procedural isn’t just one of the finest Disney movies of the last 25 years, it also has the potential to be one of the most important, in terms of the teachable moments it provides for the studio as a whole.
The Hero of Three Faces 