Why Zootopia Was Renamed Zootropolis: The Full Story Behind Disney’s Title Change

It involves a small Danish zoo, a European trademark battle, Hollywood lawyers flying to rural Denmark, and one of the stranger corporate standoffs in recent cinema history.

If you have ever pulled up Disney Plus in the UK and done a double-take at the title Zootropolis where you expected to see Zootopia, you are not alone. The name difference between American and European versions of the beloved 2016 animated film has confused audiences for nearly a decade, and with Zootopia 2 already out and carrying the same regional split, the question is worth answering properly.

Why is Zootopia called Zootropolis in the UK and much of Europe? The short answer involves trademark law, a safari park in rural Denmark, and a negotiation that brought Disney executives to one of the more unexpected locations in corporate history. Here is the full story.

The Film That Started It All

Released in March 2016 by Walt Disney Animation Studios, Zootopia is a buddy cop animated comedy set in a sprawling metropolis inhabited entirely by anthropomorphic mammals. Officer Judy Hopps, a rabbit who becomes the first of her species on the city’s police force, partners with fast-talking fox Nick Wilde to unravel a conspiracy that threatens the city’s fragile peace between predator and prey species.

The film was a critical and commercial triumph. It won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, earned nearly a billion dollars at the global box office, and was widely praised for weaving a genuinely sophisticated examination of prejudice and systemic bias into what appeared on the surface to be a cheerful animal adventure. It is, by any measure, one of Disney’s best films of the 21st century.

In the United States, Canada, Australia, and most of the world, it is called Zootopia. In the United Kingdom, Ireland, and several other European, Middle Eastern, and North African territories, it is called Zootropolis. In Germany, it goes by a different name entirely: Zoomania. Same film, three different titles, and the reason comes down to one small zoo in the Danish countryside.

The Danish Zoo That Owned the Name

The story begins not in Hollywood but in Givskud, a small town in rural Jutland, Denmark. Givskud Zoo is a safari park and zoo that opened in 1969 under the name Løveparken, meaning Lion Park, founded by Jacob Hansen who wanted to create Denmark’s first safari experience with free-roaming lions.

Over the decades the park grew significantly, eventually housing more than 700 animals across over 70 species. But by the late 2000s, management felt the Lion Park name no longer captured what the attraction had become. They wanted a broader identity that reflected the full scope of the animal world on their 120-hectare site.

Working with an advertising agency, they landed on the name Zootopia, derived from the ancient Greek meaning “place of animals.” It was elegant, distinctive, and optimistic. In 2009, Givskud Zoo registered the Zootopia trademark across the European Union. The registration was approved and covered the rights to use the name for a wide range of commercial purposes including clothing, games, and educational services across the entire European market. The zoo officially implemented the Zootopia name in 2019 when it opened a new area for its 50th anniversary.

Nobody at Givskud Zoo had any idea what was about to happen next.

Disney Comes Knocking

In the autumn of 2013, a law firm representing Disney Enterprises, Inc. sent an email to Givskud Zoo’s marketing director Morten Hechmann Andersen. Disney was developing a major animated film and had planned to call it Zootopia. They had discovered that a small Danish safari park held the European trademark for that exact name. They wanted to buy it.

What followed was months of correspondence and, eventually, in-person meetings as Disney executives made the journey to rural Denmark to negotiate directly. The stakes were considerable. The film that would become Zootopia eventually grossed nearly a billion dollars worldwide. Giving up the European naming rights had real commercial implications for a zoo that relied on its brand identity to attract visitors from across the continent.

Disney filed its own European Union trademark application for Zootropolis in October 2013, indicating the studio was already preparing an alternative title while negotiations with Givskud were ongoing. That trademark was approved and runs until October 2033.

The details of what was ultimately agreed between Disney and Givskud Zoo have not been made fully public. What is known is that Disney did not acquire the European Zootopia trademark. Instead, the studio proceeded with the Zootropolis title for UK and European release while the film’s internal setting, the city the characters inhabit, continued to be called Zootopia within the film itself. This creates the slightly disorienting situation that UK audiences watching Zootropolis hear the characters repeatedly refer to their city as Zootopia throughout, because rerecording all that dialogue would have been a significant additional cost.

Why Zootropolis Specifically?

The name Zootropolis was not simply plucked from thin air. Where Zootopia combined “zoo” with “utopia,” suggesting an ideal animal world, Zootropolis combines “zoo” with “metropolis,” leaning into the urban, city-based nature of the film’s setting. The city in the film is genuinely a metropolis, a massive, densely populated urban environment with distinct districts for different climate zones, a transit system, a police force, and all the social complexity of a real major city.

In some ways Zootropolis is arguably a more accurate description of the film’s setting than Zootopia. The city is not presented as a utopia. It has corruption, prejudice, and systemic injustice running through its institutions. Metropolis fits rather better.

Germany Gets a Third Name

If the Zootopia/Zootropolis split was not complicated enough, Germany received the film under a third title entirely: Zoomania. The reason here was different again, this time involving a German children’s book rather than a trademark conflict with a zoo.

German author Kay Fischer had published a children’s book titled Zootopolis in 2010. Disney determined that Zootropolis was too similar to Zootopolis to use in the German market without risking confusion or potential legal complications. So German audiences received their own unique title, one that had no conflict with existing properties in that territory.

The result is that the same Disney film plays under three different names across three major markets, with the city inside the film still referred to by its original name in all versions.

Disney Plus and the Confusion It Caused

The regional naming split largely existed in the background as a minor curiosity until the arrival of Disney Plus in 2019 brought everything onto a single streaming platform. Users across different regions began noticing that the same film appeared under different titles, and for UK subscribers in particular, the Zootropolis name caused genuine confusion.

A TikTok video posted in December 2021 by user Stephen Fee, filmed while he sat down to watch Encanto and noticed that Zootopia had become Zootropolis on the platform, went viral and introduced the naming discrepancy to a new generation of Disney fans who had grown up knowing the film as Zootopia. The clip prompted widespread discussion about why the name was different and whether the Mandela Effect, the phenomenon of large groups of people sharing the same false memory, was somehow responsible.

It was not the Mandela Effect. It was a Danish zoo and a trademark.

The Sequel Carries the Same Split

When Zootopia 2 arrived in cinemas in late 2025, the same regional naming structure applied. The film was released as Zootropolis 2 in the UK, Ireland, and European territories where the original had carried that name. The BAFTA nominations announced in January 2026 listed the film as Zootropolis 2, prompting fresh rounds of confusion among audiences who had spent years calling it Zootopia.

Disney’s head of animation Jared Bush confirmed in interviews around the sequel’s release that the naming question had been extensively discussed internally. The studio had apparently debated punny alternatives for the sequel title, with options including Twotopia and Twotropolis considered at various points before the team settled on the straightforward Zootopia 2, or Zootropolis 2 depending on where you happen to live.

A Broader Pattern

Zootopia and Zootropolis are far from the only Disney film to carry different names in different markets. Moana was released as Vaiana across much of Europe and as Oceania in Italy, to avoid confusion with a well-known Italian actress. The name changes reflect the genuine complexity of releasing a single product simultaneously across dozens of distinct legal, linguistic, and cultural markets.

What makes the Zootopia case particularly interesting is that the impetus came not from a translation challenge or a cultural sensitivity but from a small conservation-focused zoo in rural Denmark that had simply had the foresight to trademark a good name before anyone else thought to.

What It All Means

For most audiences, the name on the poster has never much affected their enjoyment of the film. Zootropolis and Zootopia are the same movie, with the same characters, the same story, and the same qualities that made it one of the best animated films of the past decade.

But the story behind the name change is a genuinely fascinating window into the legal and commercial machinery that operates behind even the most lovingly crafted piece of popular entertainment. A family-run safari park in Jutland held its ground against one of the most powerful entertainment companies in the world, kept its trademark, and kept its name. Givskud Zoo is still there, still operating as Zootopia, and still welcoming hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the park that inadvertently changed Disney’s release strategy for one of its most beloved films.

That is a story worth knowing, whatever you choose to call the movie.

Did you grow up knowing it as Zootopia or Zootropolis? Tell us in the comments.