Tuesday new releases: 2 December 2025

Zootopia 2 and Dead of Winter are in cinemas.

When you combine the increased social commitments of this time of year with the lack of available screens in Wellington for many releases, you find that a fair few new films have missed out on my attention this week.

The one that I really feel bad about missing out on is Die My Love¹, a serious piece of work with two big name performers (Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson) and a top director (Lynne Ramsay). Unfortunately, on Sunday there were only two sessions for the film in the Wellington region and both were a 40-minute drive away.

As I often say, and equally often fail to make good on, I’ll catch up with it when it hits the streamers.

I had high hopes for Zootopia 2 as I have been a fan of the original since I made this video review for RNZ back in 2016, but it ended up being the kind of disappointment that we often assume sequels to be — a repeat of the same formula with diminishing returns.

Odd-couple crime fighters Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin), a rabbit with imposter syndrome, and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman), a smart-talking former con artist who also happens to be a fox, have been made partners at the Zootopia Police Department after their efforts in the last film brought down the corrupt mayor. Utterly unable to follow orders from both the chief of police (Idris Elba as an African buffalo) or the new mayor (Patrick Warburton as a handsome but vain stallion), Judy and Nick are determined to crack another case. A piece of snakeskin indicates that something might be up at the posh gala to celebrate the city’s centennial.

Zootopia is able to comfortably house all of these different species because one hundred years ago a lynx invented air conditioning — a weather wall — but a snake (a rare outlawed species) played by Ke Huy Quan is determined to prove that it was his grandmother who actually invented the technology but it was stolen by the Lynxley family who took all the glory and the riches that came with it.

As in the first film, there’s a great deal of silliness and invention² in the details of the city and its inhabitants — I count more than 65 named voice actors most of whom are pure stunt casting for name recognition reasons — and I wish that the same amount of creativity had gone into the core story, a Chinatown-like tale of poor unfortunates being pushed out of their property due to power, corruption and lies.

The intended audience for Zootopia 2 will probably have a good time whether they see it in cinemas or at home, I just feel like it could have been so much better.

Emma Thompson is one of the smartest people ever to work in the movie business so when she turns up in a mid-budget violent thriller about a kidnapping gone wrong, you’d have to assume that there’s more to the story than meets the eye (correct) and that there’s some surprising depth to the characters (also correct). That, and at the age of 66 she’d like to do something she’s never done before.