'Shrek 5' To Be Scored By John Powell

TV & Film

Jun 27

John Powell at the premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018. Image Source: Variety — Image Source: Variety

An animation legend is returning to familiar stomping grounds! Or rather, familiar swamping grounds! It’s officially confirmed that Academy Award-nominated film composer John Powell will provide the score for Shrek 5!

In the realm of animation, very few composers are as prolific as John Powell. He made his animation scoring debut in 1998 with DreamWorks’ Antz alongside Harry Gregson-Williams. Since then he co-scored The Road to El Dorado and Kung Fu Panda with Hans Zimmer as well as Chicken Run with Harry Gregson-Williams once again. On his own, Powell’s biggest claim to fame are his scores for the How to Train Your Dragon franchise, with his score for the original earning him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Score. Outside of Dreamworks, Powell scored 8 of the 13 films from Blue Sky Studios, with 3 Ice Age sequels, the Rio duology, Robots, Horton Hears a Who, and Ferdinand under his belt. Outside of Dreamworks and Blue Sky, Powell has also scored the Happy Feet duology, Bolt, Mars Needs Mars, The Lorax, Migration, and Thelma the Unicorn. He’s set to reunite with Illumination with Minions and Monsters, replacing the franchise’s regular composer Heitor Pereira. Shrek 5 will be Powell’s first score for the franchise since the original film in 2001, which he scored alongside Harry Gregson-Williams. This is the first mainline Shrek film to not be scored by Harry Gregson-Williams.

John Powell is also very prolific in the realm of live action with 4 Matt Damon-led Bourne films, The Italian Job, X-Men: The Last Stand, Mr. & Smith Smith, and The Call of the Wild being amongst his best received. Powell’s most famous and acclaimed live action film scores include Solo: A Star Wars Story (for which was personally chosen by John Williams, who provided the Han Solo theme), Wicked and Wicked: For Good (which he scored alongside Stephen Schwartz), and the live action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. Wicked earned Powell his long-deserved second Oscar nomination for Best Original Score, though he and Schwartz lost to Daniel Blumberg for The Brutalist. While not yet confirmed, Powell is expected to return for the live-action remake of How to Train Your Dragon 2.