It is official, and it is a prequel. After years of Eddie Murphy teasing it, DreamWorks and Universal have dated Donkey, a standalone origin story for the most exhausting and most lovable sidekick in animation. It gallops into theaters on June 30, 2028, exactly one year after Shrek 5, and the studio is selling it with one tantalizing phrase: the story of how a donkey became Donkey.
Murphy is back. Charlie Bean, who made The Lego Ninjago Movie and the live-action Lady and the Tramp, directs, with Matt Flynn co-directing and Rebecca Huntley producing. It is the eighth film in the Shrek universe and the second character to get the spin-off treatment after Puss in Boots.
And that one phrase, how a donkey became Donkey, is about to reignite the strangest debate in animation fandom.
The theory, refined
If you have spent time in the weirder corners of the internet, you have met the Pleasure Island theory. Here is the careful version.
In Disney’s 1940 Pinocchio there is a genuinely nightmarish stretch. Boys are lured to an island where they can smoke, drink, and break every rule with no supervision. The fun is a trap. The boys are slowly turned into donkeys and sold off for labor, and the detail that has haunted viewers for generations is that a few of the transformed boys can still talk.
The theory says Donkey from Shrek is one of those boys, grown up, still able to speak. The wording there matters. Some fans go all the way and claim he is specifically Lampwick, Pinocchio’s doomed friend. That version has a hole. Pinocchio himself appears in the Shrek movies, standing in line among the captured fairy tale creatures, and he never once recognizes his old pal. If Donkey were Lampwick, you would expect at least a flicker. The sturdier version just makes Donkey one of the other, nameless Pleasure Island boys, which sidesteps the recognition problem entirely.
The clues fans point to are fun. Pinocchio is one of the only fairy tales with a talking donkey. In Shrek the Third, Donkey grumbles about wedgies and being bullied, which only really tracks if he was once a kid. And when Donkey and Puss swap bodies, Puss cannot stop braying, and Donkey tells him he will learn to control it, as if he once had to do the same.
Here is why the prequel matters
For twenty years this has been an unanswerable bar argument. A prequel called Donkey, built entirely around how he came to be, is the first real chance to settle it. The franchise is walking straight into the one question it has always dodged.
And the early signs are deliciously unclear.
Read the official phrase one way and it kills the theory. How “a donkey” became Donkey suggests he was always a donkey, just an ordinary one who grew into the motormouth we know. Murphy has also described the film around Donkey’s dragon wife and their half-dragon, half-donkey kids, the Dronkeys, which is a story about his family, not a cursed boy from a haunted island.
Read it the other way and the theory lives. In its coverage of the announcement, ScreenRant took the new details to mean Donkey was not a talking quirk of his species at all, but a human transformed into his current state, which is exactly how he can speak. If that reading holds up, the movie does not bury the Pleasure Island idea. It confirms a version of it.
The trades have not gone that far. Variety, Deadline, and others are sticking to the neutral logline and leaving the rest to us. So nobody actually knows yet whether Donkey will show a transformation or a born-this-way origin. That uncertainty is the whole fun of it.
The theory was always wobbly anyway
Before anyone declares victory, the honest caveats. In Pinocchio, the boys lose the ability to speak once they fully turn, which makes a chatty grown survivor a stretch. And in Shrek 2, Donkey drinks the Happily Ever After potion right alongside Shrek. Shrek turns into a human. Donkey turns into a stallion, not a man. If a transformed human were hiding under all that fur, you might have expected the magic to reveal it.
So the theory has never been airtight. It is suggestive, not proven, which is exactly why a prequel finally engaging with it is such a big deal.
What we actually want
Theory aside, the real test is whether Donkey earns its existence. The franchise has a strong template. The first Puss in Boots was a fairly standard origin spin-off. Then Puss in Boots: The Last Wish arrived with a daring art style and a surprisingly soulful story about mortality, and became one of the best things DreamWorks has made in years. Donkey is following that same origin-prequel path Puss walked first.
That is the bar. A Donkey prequel that is two hours of him talking too much and quoting the original would be a slog. One that finds a real story, a real ache under all that chatter, could be special. Murphy has spent twenty-five years making this character impossible not to love. The raw material is there.
Whether it confirms the Pleasure Island theory, quietly buries it, or cheekily refuses to answer, one thing is certain. A lot of grown adults are going to walk into a kids’ movie in 2028 specifically to find out where a donkey came from. That is a strange and wonderful thing to be able to say.
