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

Image via Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures / courtesy Everett Collection Published Nov 1, 2026, 12:48 PM EST Sign in to your Collider account 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.” Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Viral TikTok Song Are You? Dreams · Running Up That Hill · Murder · Golden Answer eight quick questions and we will tell you which one you are. All four of these blew up on TikTok, all four went back into the charts because of it, and three of them did it off the back of a film or a TV show. 🛹Dreams(Fleetwood Mac) 🔦Running Up That Hill(Kate Bush) 🪩Murder(Sophie Ellis-Bextor) ⭐Golden(HUNTR/X) FIND YOUR SONG → 01 How do you use TikTok? Pick the one that sounds most like you. AI scroll when I remember to. BLate at night, for hours. CConstantly, and I post too. DI save everything to folders. NEXT QUESTION → 02 What kind of song gets stuck in your head? One answer only. ASomething old and easy going. BSomething moody from the eighties. CSomething you can dance to. DSomething with a huge chorus. NEXT QUESTION → 03 What is your go-to weekend plan? Nothing booked, nowhere to be. AA long drive with no destination. BStaying in with a series on. COut somewhere, properly dressed up. DWorking on something I care about. NEXT QUESTION → 04 How would your friends describe you? Be honest. AEasy going and unbothered. BDeep and a bit intense. CEasily the most dramatic one. DThe one who gets things done. NEXT QUESTION → 05 What is your comfort watch? The one you put on without thinking. AAn old road movie. BStranger Things, from the start. CSomething glossy and a bit wicked. DAn animated film I know by heart. NEXT QUESTION → 06 Pick a drink. No wrong answers here. ACranberry juice, straight from the bottle. BTea, in the same mug always. CA cocktail with something on top. DAn iced coffee, four hours ago. NEXT QUESTION → 07 How do you handle a bad mood? Pick the closest answer. AMusic on and go outside. BSit with it for a while. CGo out and dance it off. DPut it into something useful. NEXT QUESTION → 08 What do you want people to feel around you? Last one. This is the one that decides it. ARelaxed, like everything is fine. BThat there is more underneath. CThat the night just got better. DThat I am here to win. REVEAL MY SONG → Sound On Your Song Is…A song going viral is not luck any more, it is a film scene, a TV needle drop or one perfect video doing the work a label used to do. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the story of how it took over. DreamsYou are the calmest person in any room and you are not trying to be. One man filmed himself skateboarding to work with a bottle of cranberry juice, and it became the most relaxing thing on the internet, which is roughly the effect you have on people. You do not chase things, and somehow the good ones turn up anyway. That 2020 video put a song from 1977 back on the Billboard Hot 100 for the first time since it was released. Mick Fleetwood joined TikTok specifically to recreate it, which is the band blessing the whole thing. Your flaw is that unbothered and uninterested look identical from the outside. Running Up That HillYou feel everything at full strength and most people only see about a third of it. This is a song about wanting to swap places with somebody so they finally understand you, which is a very intense thing to make a pop single about. You are the friend people come to at two in the morning, and you never mind. Stranger Things season four sent it to number one in the UK in 2022, thirty-seven years after it came out. It made Kate Bush the oldest woman ever to top the UK singles chart, at sixty-three. Your risk is living in your own head for longer than the situation strictly requires. Murder on the DancefloorYou make an entrance and you enjoy it. This is a glittering disco record with something slightly wicked underneath, which is why Emerald Fennell used it for the last scene of Saltburn and why it worked so unbelievably well. You are the most fun person at the party and nobody is ever entirely sure what you will do next. Saltburn put a 2001 single back in the UK top 10 in January 2024 and into the US charts for the first time. It gave Sophie Ellis-Bextor her biggest streaming week ever, twenty-three years after release. Your weakness is that the entrance sometimes gets more planning than the evening does. GoldenYou want to be the best at the thing you do and you are not embarrassed about saying so. Golden is a song about stepping into what you were always capable of, sung by a fictional girl group who fight demons, and it beat every real artist on the chart. You set the bar high for yourself and you quietly expect everybody else to keep up. It spent six weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the longest run for a soundtrack song in a decade. KPop Demon Hunters became the most-watched film in Netflix history, which nobody saw coming. Your flaw is treating a quiet week as a personal failure when it is just a quiet week. ↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ 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 Cast Ke Huy Quan Gary De'Snake (voice)