In the 2000s, you were hard-pressed to find a bigger Hollywood star than Shrek. The lovable ogre had four movies from 2001 to 2010, each making a ton of money, but DreamWorks Animation took a break after that. Now, after the company was sold to Comcast, it seems Shrek will be making his return.
Deadline reports that Universal, a division of Comcast, hopes to release up to four movies per year with DreamWorks. Chief among them would be new Shrek movies, but others could likely be in lucrative franchises such as How to Train Your Dragon (a third film has been in the works for a while), Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda and The Croods.
Comcast paid $US3.8 billion ($5.1 billion) for DreamWorks Animation and want to utilise their franchises to not just make movies, but merchandise and theme park attractions too.
Here’s the issue, specifically with Shrek: Unless someone was already developing a Shrek sequel, or they start today, it wouldn’t hit theatres until 2020, conservatively. That will be a full decade after the last film was released. Will the voice actors return? Will audiences still care? Given how many hundreds of millions of dollars the first four Shrek films made, I’m sure Universal is very willing to risk the answers to these questions.
[Deadline]