D espicable Me is the highest-grossing animated franchise in cinema history. There have been six feature films since the first arrived in 2010, including two prequels, Minions of 2015 and Minions: The Rise of Gru of 2022: the latter generated almost $1bn worldwide. Video games, theme-park rides and 18 short films have swelled the take.
Despicable Me has helped make the production company Illumination a rival to Pixar and DreamWorks. The company’s 14 previous feature films have each cost on average only $60m-80m to produce, but have raked in an average of $700m at the box office. The original Despicable Me remains entrancing, such a fresh discovery of the characters that have now turned into familiars.
The super-villain Gru, beginning as a properly evil Dracula type, touchingly develops over the film into a loving stepfather for the three little orphan girls he recruits for criminal purposes. The Minions, now such a mighty meme, were only added in the course of production. Designed by the Paris-based animation studio Mac Guff, which Illumination now owns, they were first conceived as robots or humans, before they became these basic yellow blobs with goggles, spouting a nonsensical language, voiced by the French-Indonesian actor and director Pierre Coffin.
Eager to serve but daft, Minions are the only politically acceptable servant joke remaining in contemporary culture. Despicable Me 4 is a hectic anthology of gags rather than a propulsive narrative. Gru (Steve Carell again).
