Nick Wilde (voice: Jason Bateman), Judy Hopps (voice: Ginnifer Goodwin) looking down with horrified expressions in Zootopia 2©Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
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Matthew Rudoy
Published 36 minutes ago
Matthew Rudoy is one of ScreenRant's Movie & TV News Editors. He covers the latest in movie & TV news, with a focus on major franchises like Star Wars, The Boys, and Game of Thrones. He wrote lists for ScreenRant from 2017-2022, became a news writer in 2023, a senior staff writer in 2024, and an editor in 2025.
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Warning: There are spoilers ahead for Zootopia 2.Despite being a family-friendly Disney movie, Zootopia 2 originally included a four-minute-long homage to The Silence of the Lambs. The animated Disney sequel features numerous Easter eggs, including one to Pixar's Ratatouille after a lion chef's hat is knocked off, revealing that a rat underneath is the one actually doing the cooking.
While speaking with Variety, co-director Jared Bush broke down how there is also a reference to The Silence of the Lambs, with the incarcerated Mayor Bellwether meant to be reminiscent of Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter.
Bush reveals that the scene was previously four minutes long and had the characters repeating the word-for-word dialogue spoken by Lecter and Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling when they first meet in the 1991 horror film. However, he eventually realized that the scene had gone too far and worried about losing the interest of younger viewers. Check out Bush's comments below:
That scene used to be four minutes long. We did word by word the first scene when Hannibal Lecter meets Clarice, all the way down to the guard saying, "All the way down the left, stay to the right."
That’s where we go, and now we have lost our younger audience members.
The final version of the film takes a more subtle route with its Silence of the Lambs Easter egg instead of turning it into a four-minute scene. Similar to Lecter, Bellwether also escapes her imprisonment, but instead of a clever and ruthless scheme, she gets out thanks to Nick Wilde accidentally freeing all the prisoners. Nick and Judy Hopps do recapture her during Zootopia 2's post-credits scene, though.
Another classic horror film, The Shining, arguably gets more prominent Easter eggs in Zootopia 2. Bush and his co-director, Byron Howard, confirm that the Lynxley manor and the giant maze behind it are homages to the Overlook Hotel and the iconic hedge maze, along with a shot of "unhinged Pawbert as Jack Nicholson."
Pawbert in Zootopia 2
With a 91% critical score and 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the reviews for Zootopia 2 have been generally positive. ScreenRant's Molly Freeman praises it as "a tightly woven mystery with plenty of emotion and humor threaded through to keep audiences of all ages engaged."
Had Bush and Howard chosen to keep the four-minute-long Silence of the Lambs homage in the movie, they probably would have temporarily lost some of their audience and struggled to keep younger viewers as engaged. While many adults would have understood the references and the word-for-word dialogue, it wasn't a risk the movie needed to take, especially since it wasn't integral to the story.
Walking this fine line between pleasing audiences of all ages is part of the key to the success of Disney's animated movies. Between the mostly positive response to Zootopia 2 and its dominant opening weekend box office performance, Disney has seemingly struck the right balance once again.
10/10
Zootopia 2
10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like Follow Followed PG Family Comedy Crime Adventure Animation Release Date November 26, 2025 Director Byron Howard, Jared Bush Writers Jared BushCast
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Ginnifer Goodwin
Judy Hopps (voice)
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Jason Bateman
Nick Wilde (voice)
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