It is Wednesday, January 14th.

Heading into this past year, I think most people would have agreed the highest grossing movie would probably be Avatar 3.

I certainly thought that, given the track record.

But here we are, and I think we can now officially call it, the biggest U.S. movie of 2025 is Zootopia 2.

It's coming up on $1.7 billion worldwide.

It's actually about to pass Inside Out to become the biggest U.S. animated movie ever, not adjusted for inflation.

Pretty amazing. It's due in part to more than $600 million grossed in China.

One of the many interesting things about Zootopia is that it's written and co-directed by the guy who also serves as the chief creative officer

at Walt Disney Animation Studios. The original Disney feature animation unit goes all the way back to the

beginning of the company. Remember, it's operated separately from Pixar, which is in the Bay Area,

though it has the same structure where a filmmaker runs creative and is paired with a business side person.

At Disney Animation, Jared Bush has been the top creative for about a year and a half.

In addition to writing and co-directing Zootopia, Zootopia 2, he's got an Oscar for

co-directing Encanto, and he wrote Moana and Moana 2 and the upcoming live action

Moana.

It's a lot of Moana.

Bush was a screenwriter and came to Disney through the TV side by creating an animated show for Disney Channel called Penn Zero

Part Time Hero, and he later pitched Disney CEO Bob Iger on the idea for Utopia himself. He's now got

a pretty challenging job considering there's a real question whether audiences will support original animated films and theaters at the level they need to be successful.

Plus the whole AI issue and many of the challenges facing Disney.

So I wanted them on the show to discuss that.

As Utopia became so huge in China, the AI questions, anime, what the next few years will look like for Disney animation.

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