Minions Return: „Minions & Monsters” Now in Theaters

There is a moment, usually around the third minute of any Minions film, when the theater stops being an audience and turns into a single collective giggle. Children laugh because it is yellow and because it falls over, parents laugh because they dimly remember a time when they too spoke a language nobody understood, and the „Despicable Me” franchise quietly fills the box office in the meantime. From today, July 1, that scene repeats in Serbian cinemas, this time under the title „Minions & Monsters”.

Universal Pictures is not selling a sequel this time but a prequel, a step backward through time all the way to 1920 and the dawn of Hollywood. The Minions, that immortal colony of round goggles and unintelligible babble, arrive in the city of dreams with one single idea: to become movie stars. To shoot their own monster spectacle they need monsters, so, entirely in keeping with their own nature, they accidentally let them loose into reality. Gru, the man who was their boss for decades and their only tether to any narrative, is absent here, and that is the most intriguing decision in the whole screenplay.

Why do the yellow creatures keep coming back?

The answer is partly commercial and partly something subtler. The Minions long ago outgrew the films they appear in; they became a pictogram, an emoji, a decoration on children’s backpacks and, occasionally, an unofficial meme in political arguments. The studio knows this, so instead of handing them a new plot it takes their context away: with no Gru, no villainous scheme to be foiled, what remains is pure, almost abstract comedy of chaos. That is braver than it looks, because the franchise deliberately gives up its only human anchor and bets that the sheer energy of the creatures is enough.

Setting the action in 1920 is no accident either. The silent film, an era in which comedy leaned on the body, the pratfall, the grimace and timing, is a natural habitat for beings who do not speak a comprehensible language in the first place. The Minions are, in a way, the last heirs of Buster Keaton and early slapstick, only digitally polished and painted yellow. When the film quotes Old Hollywood, it is really quoting its own birth certificate.

Nostalgia for a Hollywood we never saw

Behind the brightness of the images hides a curious melancholy. „Minions & Monsters” sells nostalgia for an era most of its audience never experienced, neither on screen nor in memory, yet recognizes as iconography: spotlights, a red carpet, monsters made of rubber and cardboard, the film studio as a factory of illusions. It is secondhand nostalgia, assembled from images we inherited, and precisely for that reason it works on children and adults at the same time.

Behind the camera is Pierre Coffin, co-director of the original Minions stories and the man who has for years voiced the entire colony of his heroes himself. That double role, author and performer on the same project, lends the film an unusual authorial consistency for a studio blockbuster. The premiere arrived a year earlier than planned, moved up from 2027, and the film had its world debut at the Annecy animation festival before going into wide release.

One question grows harder to ignore with every new installment: do the Minions really have anything new to say to us, or are we the ones who simply cannot resist them? Are you taking the children to the cinema this summer, or going alone, quietly, to laugh at the yellow chaos one more time?