The fans are still looking forward to a new installment in the ‘Shrek’ franchise but unfortunately, there seems to be no sign of it as of now. It has been around four years from the date when DreamWorks and NBCUniversal made an official statement to confirm the production of a new installment of this animation series that would complete this five-part long franchise. (check: Demon Slayer chapter 203.)
Originally, the ‘Shrek 5’ was to become one of the first animation movies made together by the merger of two giant production and animation houses. But since the appointment of Michael McCullers to draft a new story for the latter, there had been no official updates made by them thereafter.
Could Shrek 5 be cancelled?
Until now, all the cancellation rumours and theories related to it have been clearly busted by the news reports by giving one or another reason for the delay. One of the reasons they keep giving us is that the makers are already done with the script.
Therefore, it does not make any sense to dump the fifth installment in this popular animated franchise without any major reason. Moreover, if they have even decided to do so, then the studios should have cleared it officially as why would they bother giving rise to false hopes amongst the fans?
Just recently, a report claiming the postponement of the release of ‘Shrek 5’ could be spotted floating around. It said that the release date was pushed to the next year i.e. 2021 because of the obvious reason which is the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. But this update later turned out to be false as the DreamWorks had not released any kind of such information lately.
Earlier, Jeffrey Katzenberg who is one of the key persons at DreamWorks did come up with a statement and according to it, from the very beginning when the first ‘Shrek’ movie was premiered, they were considering making just five installments of the animated franchise including it.
It clearly suggests that if they were planning to do the fifth part of ‘Shrek’, it should definitely have been released till now or at least they should have formally announced its release date. All these circumstances might sound enough for us to believe that we might not get to see ‘Shrek 5’.
According to IGN, Katzenberg did start considering and discussing the entire concept of the storyline of this franchise with his team even before they were done with the first part. Each of the following parts were supposed to reveal the answers to the questions which might have arisen in the minds of the viewers after seeing the first part and give a deeper perspective to understand it more clearly.
The third and fourth installment of the animated franchise would show the viewers a more detailed glimpse of the ‘Shrek’ universe. Finally, coming to the fifth and last part, it would disclose the reason for Shrek to be found in that swamp where we saw him for the first time in the ‘Shrek’. The storyline of the last chapter would make us understand the deeper meaning behind it.
Possible reason for the makers to dump ‘Shrek 5’:
According to the reports of Screen Rant, the studio scraped the idea of producing the fifth installment in the franchise to give more time and focus on the making of other more desirable sequels like ‘Puss and Boots 2’.
They also revealed that though, a page for ‘Shrek 5’ has already been drafted on IMDb but that is pretty useful for now because there has not been even a single piece of officially confirmed update for the latter even after about four years since the premiere of ‘Shrek 4’.
