The fifth Shrek movie might not be so Far Far Away. An NBCUniversal employee reportedly listed Shrek 5 for a 2025 release on their LinkedIn page, then quickly deleted it. The apparent update comes after Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri in April revealed that the original cast — including Mike Myers as the misanthropic ogre Shrek, Cameron Diaz as his princess bride Fiona, and Eddie Murphy as the talkative Donkey — were in talks to return for the beloved franchise’s first installment since 2010. (Shrek spawned two feature spinoffs: 2011’s Puss in Boots and 2022’s Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.)
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Meledandri “is creatively going to try to help us figure out how to resurrect Shrek and take a lot of the existing DreamWorks franchises and add value as we create new franchises,” NBCUniversal chief Steve Burke said in 2016 after acquiring DreamWorks Animation, which has produced the Shrek franchise since 2001.
The Illumination head behind the Despicable Me, Secret Life of Pets, and Sing franchises — as well as the smash hit Super Mario Bros. Movie he co-produced with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto — has said that there is “tremendous enthusiasm on behalf of the actors” to return to the roles they last reprised in Shrek Forever After in 2010.
“It’s not that dissimilar to the process that we went through with Mario, where you look at what the core elements are that audienceshave loved, and you do your very best to honor those core elements,”Meledandri previously told Variety. “And then you’re hard at work to build story elementsand new characters that take you to brand new places. The original castis a huge part of that.”
With DreamWorks spinning off legendary swashbuckler Puss (voiced by Antonio Banderas) into his own hit franchise, Meledandri suggested Donkey could star in his own Shrek spinoff after Murphy said he would “do a Donkey movie” and “would do another Shrek in two seconds.”
“They did Puss in Boots movies. I was like, ‘They should have did aDonkey movie,’” Murphy told Etalk earlier this year. “Donkey is funnier than Puss in Boots. Imean, I love Puss in Boots, but he ain’t funny as the Donkey.”
Based on the book by William Steig, the original anti-fairy tale grossed nearly $500 million at the global box office in 2001. Shrek 2, released in 2004, was once the highest-grossing animated movie in history and remains the studio’s biggest success with a global haul of $935 million; two more sequels, 2007’s Shrek the Third and 2010’s Shrek Forever After, earned $807 million and $756 million worldwide, respectively.
