Nintendo Could Be Thinking About A Donkey Kong Movie

It’s a great week to be Donkey Kong — his biggest starring role in years, Donkey Kong Bananza, ships for Switch 2 later this week, and now we’re hearing rumors he may have inked a deal to star in his own feature film.

The press has spotted a joint copyright filing between Nintendo and Universal Pictures for something called “Untitled Donkey Kong Project.” No, it’s not a game (why would you think that if Universal was involved)…the filing specifically states it’s a “motion picture,” though nothing else beyond that.

Nintendo, as you know, is incredibly secretive about its own projects and prefers not to reveal them until they’re very close to complete. They’d probably prefer no one noticed that filing, which has to be public beyond their control. We didn’t know about Donkey Kong Bananza until earlier this year, and Nintendo has confirmed it’s been in development for years, intended for the original Switch until they discovered the destructive environments needed more horsepower than that machine could produce.

Nintendo and Universal have likely just started their plans for a DK feature — and they could change. When a movie is this early in development, there are no guarantees it will make it to completion. What we CAN guarantee is that a sequel / spinoff to The Super Mario Bros Movie will appear next year — it will be called Super Mario World and Miyamoto told Nintendo investors  “We have reached a point where we are confident that the new movie will be an entertaining film, so we have announced its theatrical release for next spring.” April 3, 2026 to be precise.

After that, Nintendo has a live-action Legend of Zelda movie planned, which is currently set for May 7, 2027. Only after all that would we possibly see a Donkey Kong movie. Our guess is that, if it happens, it doesn’t show its monkey face until 2028 at the earliest.