Hit or flop: Disney's recent animation

The count is settled at 64. The live question is whether Disney can still make them land. Tap through the last few years.

64 — but it depends what you call a "Disney film"

The clean answer is 64: the Disney Animated Canon, the run of feature films from Walt Disney Animation Studios that began with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937 and reached its 64th, Zootopia 2, in 2025. Disney started numbering these films for advertising in the late 1980s, which is why you sometimes see a film billed as "Disney's 50th animated classic." A 65th, Hexed, is scheduled for 2026.

Loosen the definition and the number climbs fast. Add Pixar's films, the dozens of direct-to-video sequels, the live-action remakes, and the animated output of acquired studios, and "Disney animation" runs well past a hundred. The canon is the number people usually mean — but it is a deliberately narrow slice of what Disney has actually made.

How many are in black and white? None.

This one surprises people. Given that the canon stretches back to the 1930s, you might assume the earliest films were black and white. They were not. Every single one of the 64 is in colour.

Walt Disney made an expensive, contrarian bet on Technicolor early — his studio had already used it to win an Academy Award for the 1932 short Flowers and Trees — and when he gambled the studio on the first-ever feature-length animation, Snow White arrived in full colour in 1937. Disney's black-and-white era was its shorts: Mickey Mouse's debut in Steamboat Willie (1928), the Alice Comedies, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. No Disney animated feature has ever been black and white.

Were they all cinema releases? The canon, yes — the rest, no

All 64 canon films opened in cinemas — a theatrical release is essentially part of what qualifies a film for the canon. But that is precisely why the canon is so much smaller than Disney's real animated output. Through the 1990s and 2000s, Disney churned out dozens of direct-to-video sequels — The Lion King II, Cinderella II, the Aladdin follow-ups — that went straight to home video and are deliberately excluded from the canon.

The line blurred again during the pandemic, when Disney sent several Pixar films (Soul, Luca, Turning Red) straight to Disney+. It was a short-term fix that, by Disney's own later reckoning, trained families to wait for animation at home — a habit that haunted the box office for years afterward.

Is animation Disney's main income? Not even close

For a company built on cartoons, the money map is counter-intuitive. Disney's biggest profit centre is not film at all — it is Experiences: the theme parks, cruise ships, resorts and merchandise, which delivered a record ~$10 billion operating income in fiscal 2025. In one recent quarter that single segment was about 38% of Disney's revenue but roughly 71% of its operating profit. The entire Entertainment segment — studios, streaming and TV combined — earned $4.7 billion for the year.

So animation is "what Disney did well" rather than where the cash comes in directly. But that framing undersells it. The parks are full of rides, the shelves full of toys, and Disney+ full of subscribers because of characters that animation created. Animation is not the engine — it is the thing that builds the engine. A flop hurts; a beloved new character can pay for a decade of park attractions.

Does anyone still care — and can Disney make a new one?

For a while the obituary wrote itself: Covid streaming habits, a run of disappointments, the sense that Disney animation had lost its grip. The numbers say the opposite. Inside Out 2, Moana 2 and Zootopia 2 were three billion-dollar hits in two years, and Zootopia 2 is now the biggest Hollywood animated film ever made. People plainly still care — a lot.

But look at what those hits have in common, and the worry comes back from a different direction. Every one is a sequel. The genuinely new films — Strange World, Wish — bombed, and badly. Disney can reliably turn a beloved character into a billion dollars; what it has struggled to do lately is mint a beloved character in the first place. A studio that lives on sequels is a studio slowly spending a back catalogue it built decades ago.

And the crown is no longer guaranteed: the single biggest animated film on Earth is now China's Ne Zha 2, at $2.25 billion, made entirely outside Hollywood. So the real question behind "how many Disney animated films are there" is not the count — it is whether number 65, 70 or 80 will be another safe return to Zootopia, or the first new world in years that audiences fall for. On the answer to that rides not just a film, but the next generation of rides, toys and characters the whole company runs on.

The Disney Animation Quiz

Six questions on the canon and the business behind it. Every answer is sourced below.

Frequently asked

Sources

• Disney Wiki / Walt Disney Animation Studios (updated 2026) — Disney Animated Canon at 64 films; Zootopia 2 as #64; Hexed (2026) as #65; Winnie the Pooh (2011) the last hand-drawn entry.
• The Walt Disney Company / Variety / Deadline (Jan 2026) — Zootopia 2 at $1.703B, the highest-grossing Hollywood animated film of all time, ahead of Inside Out 2 ($1.69B).
• NBC News (2024) — Moana 2 past $1B; the pandemic Disney+ releases and their effect on theatrical habits.
• Disney FY2025 results / CNBC (Nov 2025-Feb 2026) — Experiences record ~$10B operating income; ~71% of company operating profit; Entertainment $4.7B.
• Variety / Deadline (2026) — China's Ne Zha 2 at $2.25B as the biggest animated film worldwide.

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