EDDIE MURPHY SHARES “SHREK 5” UPDATE, REVEALS DONKEY SPINOFF

It ain't ogre 'til it's ogre.

Eddie Murphy’s ass is ready for more Shrek.

In an interview with Collider, the Beverly Hills Cop star revealed that he’s returning to the voiceover booth for not one, but two new Donkey projects in the world of Shrek. “We started doing Shrek four or five months ago, I think,” Murphy told the outlet. “I recorded the first act, and we'll be doing it this year, we’ll finish it up.”

That film will be the fifth mainline Shrek movie, which Murphy believes is releasing in 2025 — nearly a quarter-century after the original irreverent fantasy-comedy hit theaters in 2001. Though the broader franchise has continued with two Puss in Boots spinoff movies, Murphy’s Donkey and Mike Myers’ Shrek have laid dormant in their swamp since 2010’s Shrek Forever After. (Both characters did appear for a few seconds in unspeaking cameos in a flashback sequence in the second Puss in Boots film, however.)

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish breathed new life into the Shrek franchise in 2022, earning rave reviews, an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature, and DreamWorks Animation’s best performance at the domestic box office in nearly a decade (though it has since been passed by this year’s Kung Fu Panda 4). Upon that film’s success, Murphy voiced his desire for a Donkey spinoff. "I was like, 'They should have done a Donkey movie,’” he told ETalk last year.

“Donkey is funnier than Puss in Boots. I mean, I love Puss in Boots, but he ain't funny as the Donkey."

Now, it seems that Murphy’s dream is coming true. “Donkey's gonna have his own movie,” he told Collider. “We're gonna do Donkey [movie] as well. So we're gonna do a Shrek, and we're doing a Donkey.”

God only knows what a Donkey-centric feature could look like. Will it lend credence to the distressing fan theory that Murphy’s character is actually a human child who was transformed into an animal at Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island? Will it be a rom-com between Donkey and his wife, Dragon? Will he finally fulfill his promise to make waffles in the morning?

Related: Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F director says Eddie Murphy improvised 'the funniest moments'

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Though Forever After was marketed as the final chapter in the series, rumblings of a potential Shrek revival have persisted for over a decade. Former DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg teased a fifth film in 2014, and after the animation studio was acquired by Universal in 2016, a top NBCUniversal exec said that Illumination head Chris Meledandri would attempt to “figure out how to resurrect Shrek” in 2016. 

Meledandri, who oversees the Despicable Me and Secret Life of Pets franchises, teased that the sequel was beginning to come together last year. “We anticipate the cast coming back,” he told Variety. “Talks are starting now, and every indication that we’ve gotten is there’s tremendous enthusiasm on behalf of the actors to return.” 

Related: Eddie Murphy gets his Foley groove back in the Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F trailer

The timing of the new Shrek is fairly fortuitous for bringing the original actors back into the fold, as Cameron Diaz, who voiced Fiona in all four prior films, retired from acting in 2014, but is returning to screens later this year in Netflix’s Back in Action.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.

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