It has been eight days ago Minions: The Rise of Gru premiered, and American cinemas have not yet recovered. Gru-passengers have arrived in thousands, many wearing formal suits, cheering loudly and occasionally tossing bananas on display to celebrate the year’s most unlikely box office. The only thing that has been seen more than the film itself in the past week may be that hundreds of TikToks and tweets made about it.
Rise of Gru is the fifth film in the Minions series that began with Despicable Me in 2010. The plot focuses on Gru, an 11-year-old with a vague Russian accent, who employs a team of minions in his quest to become a supervillain. Gru is the main character, but in reality the film is about henchmen – a species of squishy yellow blob, whose origins were explored in the 2015s henchmen, the third installment of the franchise. They speak in effervescent volapyk (a random mixture French, English, Spanish and Italian), dresses almost exclusively in denim, and injects the films with a kind of slapstick comedy that has made them popular with children for a decade.
Minions mania is nothing new. The first four films earned more than $ 3.5 billion worldwide at the box office, making it that most lucrative animated film franchise of all times. But even those movies pale in comparison Rise of Gru, which has slung the global spread of the franchise past the 4 billion brand and inflated the internet with a hype so contagious that even people who had never seen Despicable Me has become part of the #minion cult.
For some, this is purely random chaos. A video explains the #minion cult as a kind of viral challenge to “take over TikTok” with banana emojis and matching profile pictures. Of course, random chaos is exactly what minions do best. In a movie, they use their enormous laboratory resources to build a fart gun. Because why not! TikTokeren, there started the trendgoing by @HutchBucketz, just wanted to see if Universal Pictures would invite him to the premiere of Rise of Gru if he generated enough hype. (Unfortunately, the studio did not.)
Others, many of them young people who have grown up with the franchise, have joined forces on a different trend. It involves showing up in cinemas galore, wearing formal attire and greeting each other in the gentlemanly way like Gru. Last weekend, the presence of these #GentleMinions was so pronounced that at least one theater in the UK staged a sign warning that it would not allow suit-and-tie patrons to enter. Universal, meanwhile, broadcast a tweet says “to everyone who shows up to @Minions in suits: we see you and we love you.”
Ryan Broderick, who writes the Garbage Day newsletter on Substack, suggested that #GentleMinions might have emerged as a reference to a previous meme around the 2019 movie Joker, where people posted pictures of incel-like men with the headline “two tickets to Joker, Please. “Young people dressed in suits and asking for“ 30 million tickets more MinionsFeels like a riff on the old trend.