Eddie Murphy’s ‘Shrek’ Salaries Have Earned Him Tens of Millions of Dollars

One of Hollywood's more profitable animated IP's is Shrek. The fairy-tale themed series of films has grossed over $4 billion worldwide across four main films and two spin-off flicks. Which places it right behind the Despicable Me movies in terms of pure profit in animated features.

While there's a lot of reasons audiences love the Shrek movies, one of the biggest draws, especially for the first film, was Eddie Murphy's attachment as Donkey. And the stand-up comic/movie star has made a lot of money for his efforts in the DreamWorks franchise.

Big stars haven't always earned a ton of money for their voice-acting work in legendary animated films. Take Robin Williams' salary in Disney's Aladdin for instance. Murphy didn't have that issue with Shrek, however.

The Beverly Hills Cop leading man earned a $350,000 paycheck for the first Shrek movie, but that was only the beginning of his payout from the flick.

Since his deal incorporated box office points tethered to the film's success, Murphy ended up netting a whopping $3 million from the feature after it skyrocketed to $494,284,518 in global ticket sales. Not long after, Shrek 2 was put into pre-production, and Murphy secured an even more lucrative deal.

The actor's salary jumped to $10 million for the sequel, which is an insane amount of money. However, when one considers that Shrek 2 had earned a staggering $933,848,612 in box office ticket sales, that figure doesn't seem so outrageous.

Unsurprisingly, the success of the second feature begat Shrek the Third, which was also a colossal success with 807,330,936. While The Things mentions that Murphy's salary for the third installment of the Shrek series remains undisclosed, it's difficult to imagine the actor didn't receive as much as he did for the previous film or even more for his work on it.

The fourth movie, Shrek Forever After was another huge payday for Murphy, who was given a $12 million base salary with box office percentage points wrapped up in that. Seeing as the fourth Shrek film made over $756 million in theater sales, Murphy's total earnings from it are said to be between $15-$20 million.

Deadline confirmed in July, 2025 that Eddie Murphy will indeed be reprising his role as Donkey in the upcoming Shrek movie. While he was promoting The Pickup he said he was actively performing voice over work for the movie.

"We're still in the booth, and literally, we're still doing Shrek," Murphy said in an interview with ScreenRant. Furthermore, he informed the outlet that there was also a spin-off movie focusing on his character in the flick as well.

"We're doing a Donkey one, and that'll be three years from now, but we're about two years into Shrek 5. Still in the booth and about to start Donkey in September," he said. Murphy added that the narrative structure would be akin to the Puss in Boots spin-offs Dreamworks made about the orange, sword-wielding cat voiced by Antonio Banderas.

"Donkey's going to have his own movie, own little story with his dragon wife and his kids that are half-dragon and half-donkeys. They've written this funny story. We're doing that, starting that in September," he remarked.

The fifth Shrek movie was delayed until the summer of 2027. While there was a lot of speculation as to why this is the case, many fans have surmised that it's due to devotees of the franchise successfully guessing the entire plot of the film.