By The fifth film in Illumination’s Despicable Me franchise, Minions: The Rise of Gru releases July 3, 2020. The boys at behind the boys in yellow opted to drop for a :30 second spot during Sunday’s Super Bowl, but thought the money best served with a :30 trailer for the trailer. That full-length trailer just dropped today and you can see it below.
More importantly, if you’re wondering how a franchise that began 10 years ago and that revolves around a bunch of incomprehensible, mutant, yellow potato spuds as much as it does Steve Carrel’s voice talent, you’ve come to the right place. The Despicable Me franchise is a fucking animation powerhouse. Illumination might not have the rep that big bad Pixar does, or even DreamWorks, but this franchise is a certified hit. Check out the box office and budget numbers below, and see just who drives these films.
- 2010 – Despicable Me $543.1M ($251.5M domestic against $69M budget)
- 2013 – Despicable Me 2 $970.8M ($368M domestic against $76M budget)
- 2015 – Minions $1.159B ($336M domestic against $74M budget)
- 2017 – Despicable Me 3 $1.0348B ($264.6M domestic against $80M budget)
That’s right, the first Minions is the highest grossing of all four so far, and Carrel’s Gru is largely an after thought in it. No one’s buying Gru plushies. With continued returns like this, and the ability to take the franchise back to its roots by bypassing it’s original lead for a henchman origin story, Illumination (and parent-co Universal), allowed for a fresh new take and countless new story options that aren’t limited to the bad-guy-turned-good-guy growth story that defines the primary Despicable Me trilogy. More-so, the Minion spin-offs can now return to their original villain, but in a different time period, bringing all of their pieces back to play on the board.
It’s quite brilliant really, and sets the still-highly-successful precedent to spinoff the films in different, Gru-free, directions at any point. Imagine how many potential villains there are out there in the wide world for the minions to get entangled with: countless. And as long as we keep shelling out for these fantastic popcorn/kid movies, they’ll happily keep mining this IP gold.
