Night of the Zoopocalypse 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 Ricardo Curtis and Rodrigo Perez-Castro’s computer-animated family film “Night of the Zoopocalypse” will make its market premiere at this year’s AFM, with global representation from Anton and Charades.

Viva Pictures is handling distribution in the U.S. and will release the film on March 7, 2025. Elevation Pictures will release the film next year in Canada, and Apollo Films will release it in France.

Directors: Ricardo Curtis, Rodrigo Perez-Castro
Writers:  Steven Hoban, James Kee
Stars: David Harbour, Bryn McAuley, Paul Sun-Hyung Lee

In this incandescent family horror-comedy, a meteor unleashes an alien virus that transforms the animals at the Colepepper Zoo into slavering zombie mutants. Bearing all the hallmarks of the zombie genre, “Zoopocalypse” is expertly animated and features crisp, completely original character designs. The artists working on the film use clever lighting and the fog associated with low-budget horror films to elevate the film’s aesthetic far beyond traditional computer-generated indie productions.

“Zoopocalypse” stars David Harbour (“Stranger Things”), Paul Sun-Hyung Lee (“The Mandalorian”), Scott Thompson (“The Kids in the Hall”) and Gabbi Kosmidis (“Unicorn Academy”). The directors are highly respected veterans of the animation industry. Curtis has worked on titles such as “The Iron Giant,” “Epic” and Guillermo del Toro’s Arcadia franchise on Netflix. Perez-Castro’s credits include “Rio,” “The Book of Life” and the “Ice Age” franchise.

Produced by Toronto’s House of Cool (“Ice Age,” “Paw Patrol”) and Copperheart Entertainment (“Splice”), France’s Charades (“Belle”) and U Media in Belgium, the film features animation by Atelier Animation in Montreal and Mac Guff in France and Belgium. “Zoopocalypse” impressed at Annecy with a Work in Progress presentation this summer to delighted crowds at Spain’s prestigious Sitges genre film festival in October.

For the film's AFM market debut, filmmakers Curtis and Perez-Castro and writer-producer Steve Hoban spoke with us about the incredible amount of work that went into making their independent film, keeping things PG-13, and the rites of passage that come with the horror genre.

First of all, thank you for acknowledging how difficult it is to make a film like this—a North American independent film that looks good takes a lot of work. This film was a co-production between House of Cool and Copperheart Pictures, two Toronto-based companies that have known each other for a long time. It turns out that Copperheart really wanted to do animation; they just didn't have experience in feature animation. In the meantime, we've worked on $100, $150 million films, so it was like putting our chocolate and their peanut butter together, and we were able to make something that we all love. They're experts at putting together complex deals across multiple territories, and when it comes to independent filmmaking, you have to know how to play financial Twister to make things happen.

“Zoopocalypse” is the perfect example of cinema-oriented co-productions. All three countries [Canada, France and Belgium] were instrumental in financing and making the film to such a high standard. I think it represents the best of all financing and production partners. Our budget was a little too big and our ambitions for the film a little too high to easily finance and produce the film. So we had to be resourceful and a little masochistic in using all kinds of equity, debt, incentives and pre-sales to finance and then we further complicated things by making the film with studios in five different cities and artists in over a dozen different locations.

The North American storytelling sensibility of the script and direction combined with very high-quality European artistic talent is what allowed us to present a film with international appeal and first-class production values ​​that far exceed what we would have been able to do in a single country.

Watch Night of the Zoopocalypse 2025 Movie Trailer