Minions & Monsters (2026) [Movie Review]

How did I end up liking Minions & Monsters so much? If you’re an adult and have dodged the film for the most part, I’ll break it down for you. Illumination sends its pill-shaped mischief-makers back to 1927 for a slapstick love letter to the silent era, and against every reasonable expectation, it works. Mostly.

Quick Take

Category	Score
Film	82 / 100
Direction	85 / 100
Voice Cast	84 / 100
Score & Sound Design	86 / 100
Overall (Theatrical)	83 / 100

The Pitch: The best-reviewed film the Despicable Me machine has ever produced, a genuinely inventive first hour of silent-comedy homage that eventually trips over its own banana peel when the actual monsters show up.

Bananas for the Bijou

Here is a sentence I did not expect to type in 2026: the critical establishment is falling over itself to praise a Minions movie. Not a Pixar film. Not a hand-drawn passion project smuggled out of some boutique studio. A Minions movie, the seventh entry in a franchise that has spent sixteen years turning gibberish and pratfalls into one of the most lucrative merchandising empires in the history of animation.

And yet here we are. Minions & Monsters opened in wide release on July 1, and it arrived carrying the best reviews the entire Despicable Me universe has ever seen. Early on, its Rotten Tomatoes number spiked into the low nineties before settling, as these things do once the full wave of critics files in, into the high eighties. Metacritic landed it at a respectable 67. Both figures represent franchise highs, edging past the 80 percent that the original 2010 Despicable Me held onto for well over a decade. For a series whose solo Minions outings have historically been review-proof cash cows rather than critical darlings, that is a genuine sea change.

So what happened? The short version is that Minions and Monsters director Pierre Coffin, who also voices every last one of the little yellow lunatics, finally found an idea worthy of them. Not just a setting or a gimmick, but a thesis. Minions & Monsters argues, with surprising conviction, that these creatures are not a symptom of cultural decline but a direct descendant of the very impulses that built cinema in the first place: bodies in motion, working overtime to make you laugh. It is a film about the movies, made by people who clearly love the movies, and that love is contagious enough to paper over a back half that does not entirely hold together.

Let me walk you through it.

A Reel Origin Story

The conceit is elegant. We open in the present, at a film history museum, where a tour guide begins spinning a tall tale for a group of visitors. The story he tells is set in 1927, roughly forty-one years before the events of the 2015 Minions film, and it concerns a different tribe of Minions than the one that would eventually pledge itself to a young Gru.

These particular Minions have the same fatal occupational hazard as their descendants. They exist to serve the world’s greatest villains, and they keep accidentally killing those villains through sheer incompetence. The film mines this running gag for a montage of misadventure before narrowing its focus onto three specific little guys: James, an artistically inclined Minion with a passion for painting and drawing; Henry; and Ed. When one of their masters, a wicked warlock, is dispatched by a monster that Henry unwittingly summons from a spellbook, Ed pockets the book, and the trio find themselves adrift in a rapidly transforming Los Angeles.

That transformation is the whole game. In 1927 Hollywood, the movie industry is remaking itself in real time, and our three Minions stumble directly into the beating heart of it. They become silent movie stars. They taste fame, they lose it all, and in trying to mount a monster picture of their own, they unleash actual monsters onto the world, which forces them to band together to clean up the very mess they created.

The official logline calls it “the rambunctious, ridiculous and totally true story of how the Minions conquered Hollywood.” That “totally true” is the film winking at you, and the wink is earned, because the whole thing is framed as a fantasy conceived by the Minions themselves. Any narrative wobbliness, and there is plenty, reads more forgivably once you accept that you are inside a story being embellished by the least reliable narrators imaginable.

The Long Road to 1927

For a film this breezy, Minions & Monsters took a surprisingly winding path to the screen, and the production history is worth a beat because it explains some of what ended up on screen. Illumination announced the project back in July 2024, riding the wave of Despicable Me 4, with Coffin set to direct and Brian Lynch to write. Patrick Delage came aboard as co-director. Curiously, the film shares its title with a 2021 short of the same name that aired on NBC and later turned up on the home video release of Minions: The Rise of Gru, so the concept had been rattling around Illumination’s idea drawer for a while before it graduated to feature length.

The release date is its own small drama. The film was originally staked out for June 2027, then leapfrogged nearly a full year forward into a July 2026 slot that had been reserved for DreamWorks Animation’s Shrek 5 before that ogre got postponed. Universal filled the vacancy with its most reliable earners. The studio primed the pump with a promo during Super Bowl LX in February, then rolled out footage at CinemaCon in April, before the film had its formal coming-out party at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 21. There is a certain irony in a movie about the chaos of early Hollywood having such a scrambled, opportunistic release calendar. The Minions would approve.

Silent but Deadly Funny

The reason this premise sings is that it hands Coffin a natural engine for comedy that the franchise has never had access to before. The Minions have always been, at their core, silent-film comedians. They communicate in gibberish and physical business. Their entire vocabulary is slapstick. Dropping them into the literal birth of screen comedy is the kind of idea that seems obvious only after someone brilliant has already had it.

The first half of Minions & Monsters is a nonstop parade of silent-comedy homage, and it is the strongest sustained stretch of animated comedy Illumination has produced in years. There is a Harold Lloyd riff, with a Minion left dangling from the hands of an enormous clock, that lands as both a gag and a piece of film-literate affection.

There is Chaplin, most memorably a Minion swallowed up by the gears of a mechanical system in a nod to Modern Times. Buster Keaton’s stone-faced daredevil physics get their due as well. The genius of the sequence is that these references function on two completely separate frequencies at once. For the kids in the audience, they are simply funny things happening to funny little creatures. For the film buffs in the room, they are a scavenger hunt, and a deeply satisfying one.

This is where the film separates itself from every other Minions outing. Those movies were content to be pure kinetic chaos. This one has an actual argument threaded through the chaos, and the argument is that the Minions belong to a lineage. When Variety describes the film as “madly moviosa,” it is getting at exactly this quality: a picture so genuinely, weirdly enthusiastic about the medium it lives inside that its enthusiasm becomes its own form of charm.

From the Vaults: A Homage Hunter’s Field Guide

In the spirit of the AndersonVision deep dive, here is where the film rewards the patient viewer with a paused-remote sensibility. Minions & Monsters is stuffed with visual quotations from the actual history of the moving image, and part of the pleasure of the thing is clocking them as they fly past. Sharp-eyed viewers have already catalogued a remarkable roster of nods, spanning the entire pre-sound era and beyond.

The film reaches all the way back to the primordial soup of cinema: Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, the Lumiere brothers and their workers leaving the factory, a train pulling into a station, and Georges Melies conjuring his trip to the moon. It touches Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery and the Australian landmark The Story of the Kelly Gang.

It nods to the eerie iconography of Haxan, the vertiginous stunt work of Safety Last, the montage theory of Battleship Potemkin, and Keaton’s locomotive epic The General. As the timeline pushes toward the film’s own 1927 setting, it namechecks the two titans of that year, the science-fiction cathedral of Metropolis and the aerial spectacle of Wings, before spilling into the early sound era with Steamboat Bill Jr, and eventually the Universal monster tradition itself by way of The Mummy and King Kong. There are gestures toward Chaplin’s Modern Times and The Great Dictator, and even a Maltese Falcon beat waiting further down the road.

Not every reference is a full set piece. Some are background gags, a poster here, a silhouette there. But the density is the point. This is a movie that assumes an audience curious enough to look things up afterward, and for a certain kind of physical-media obsessive, that is catnip. It is the closest a mainstream animated tentpole has come to functioning as a gateway drug into the boutique-label back catalogue, and I mean that as the highest compliment I know how to give.

Casting Call: Who Is Voicing Whom

Coffin voices the Minions, of course, because at this point no one else could. But the surrounding human ensemble is genuinely stacked, and Illumination cashed in every favor it had to assemble it.

Trey Parker, the South Park co-creator who previously voiced the gloriously deranged Balthazar Bratt in Despicable Me 3, returns to the fold in a new role and brings his particular brand of manic commitment. Allison Janney, who voiced Madge Nelson all the way back in the first Minions film, comes back to the franchise as well, lending it her reliable comic authority. Christoph Waltz does what Christoph Waltz does, which is to make silky menace sound like a delight. Jeff Bridges brings that lived-in, gravel-and-warmth presence that instantly grounds any scene he touches.

The standout addition, at least on paper, is Jesse Eisenberg as a new character named Dort, joined by another newcomer called Goomi. Eisenberg’s nervy, rapid-fire cadence is an inspired fit for the film’s frantic energy. Zoey Deutch, fresh off her turn in Nouvelle Vague, rounds out the principal cast, and Bobby Moynihan and Phil LaMarr fill out the bench with the kind of dependable voice work that animation lives or dies on.

And then there is the stunt casting to end all stunt casting. Filmmaker George Lucas turns up in the film, having reportedly been approached by producer Chris Meledandri after word got out that Lucas is a genuine, self-professed fan of the Despicable Me franchise. There is something almost poetic about the man who spent a career pushing the technological frontier of blockbuster spectacle showing up in a movie that is, at heart, a celebration of where all of that spectacle began.

Scoring Points

A quick note for the audio-obsessed, because it matters even in a theatrical context. John Powell handles the score, marking his third collaboration with Illumination after The Lorax and Migration. Notably, this is the first Despicable Me installment not scored by the Pharrell Williams and Heitor Pereira team that defined the franchise’s sonic identity for over a decade.

That is a bigger deal than it sounds. The Minions have always come pre-loaded with a bouncy, pop-inflected soundscape. Handing the reins to Powell, a composer with deep roots in animation and a gift for propulsive orchestral adventure, signals that this film wants to be taken a shade more seriously as a piece of filmmaking. The result leans into the period, evoking the swagger of a silent-era orchestra pit and the brassy self-mythology of Old Hollywood. When “Hooray for Hollywood” turns up on the soundtrack, it is doing double duty, both celebrating and gently satirizing the industry’s endless capacity for self-congratulation.

The Two-Reeler Problem

Now for the banana peel. Because as much as I have praised the front half of this movie, I have to be straight with you about the back half, and here the critical consensus and I are in firm agreement.

The trouble starts when the monsters actually arrive. For its first stretch, Minions & Monsters is a nimble, idea-forward comedy about show business. Then Henry’s spellbook does its thing, the creatures get loose, and the film pivots into an extended action climax that feels distressingly familiar. All the specificity and film-literate wit that made the opening act soar gives way to the exact brand of over-caffeinated set-piece freneticism that afflicts so many kid-targeted animated films. It is not bad, exactly. It is just ordinary, and ordinary is a steep drop from where the movie started.

The film has a clean, crystalline premise sitting right there in its title, and it keeps wandering away from it. Even the movie’s champions concede the point. The RogerEbert.com review, one of the most glowing, explicitly flags the “less compelling second half.” The New York Times called it “shaggy and meandering.” The word that keeps recurring across even the positive notices is “disjointed,” and the film’s own framing device, the unreliable-narrator conceit, feels at least partly designed to preemptively excuse that quality.

So the honest assessment is this: Minions & Monsters is a movie with a great forty-five minutes at the front, a serviceable-to-tiresome forty-five minutes at the back, and just enough goodwill banked in the first stretch to carry you affectionately through the second. Whether that math works for you depends entirely on how much you cherish the good part.

The Critic-Audience Gap

There is a fascinating wrinkle worth flagging, because it complicates the rapturous critical narrative. The general audience does not appear to be nearly as enchanted as the reviewers. Trawl through the early user reactions and you find a decidedly cooler reception, with families reporting that their kids were unmoved, that the film felt disjointed and boring, and, in the bluntest verdicts, that it ranks among the weakest Minions outings rather than the best. One recurring complaint is structural in the same way the professional critiques are, that the movie-within-a-movie framing keeps holding the actual Minions at arm’s length. Another is simpler: without Gru at the center, some longtime fans feel unmoored.

This gap tells you something important about who the film is really for. Minions & Monsters is, at heart, a movie made by film lovers for film lovers, wearing a Minions costume to get into the building. The critics who spend their lives steeped in Chaplin and Keaton are the exact audience primed to swoon at a Harold Lloyd homage.

The seven-year-old who just wants to watch the little guys fart and fall down may find the whole silent-cinema seminar a bit much. Neither reaction is wrong. They are simply two different films watching the same screen. For the AndersonVision readership, which skews heavily toward the former camp, that is a reassuring data point. This one was built for people who love the medium.

One small parental heads-up worth passing along, since this is ostensibly a family film: at least one moment slips a mild profanity into the mix, so the PG rating is doing a little work. Nothing alarming, but worth knowing before you buy four tickets.

The Big Picture Show

Here is the thing that pushes the film over the line into recommendation for me, and it is the same thing that got the film’s more sentimental defenders misty-eyed. Underneath all the pratfalls, Minions & Monsters is quietly, sincerely, unabashedly in love with the act of going to the movies. Not watching movies. Going to them. The communal, lights-down, strangers-laughing-together ritual of it.

Several critics singled out an extended tribute near the end to the theatrical experience itself, describing it as unexpectedly moving. Drew Taylor at TheWrap called out that open-hearted quality as the thing that elevates the film. In an era of shrinking attention spans and endless anxiety about whether kids will ever care about a movie made before they were born, there is something genuinely touching about a mass-market cartoon using its most bankable characters to smuggle in a plea for cinema history. The Minions, of all creatures, become the delivery mechanism for a message about preservation and continuity and the enduring magic of the darkened room.

For that reason alone, this is a film worth seeing in a theater rather than waiting for the inevitable home release. It is playing in RealD 3D and in premium large-format presentations including Dolby Cinema, where the monster-movie climax at least has the scale to justify its own excess. If the film is going to spend its final act arguing for the irreplaceable power of the big screen, the least you can do is let it make that argument on the big screen.

About Those Grosses

I would be doing you a disservice not to mention the elephant, or perhaps the banana, in the room. For all its rapturous reviews, Minions & Monsters is not exactly setting the box office ablaze. Trade reporting has pegged its opening as a franchise low, with a five-day debut hovering somewhere north of 64 million dollars domestically. To put that in context, 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru grossed roughly 940 million dollars worldwide, and 2024’s Despicable Me 4 pulled in around 972 million.

The reasons are more about the calendar than the quality. This is the seventh film in a sixteen-year-old franchise, which averages out to a new installment roughly every two years, so there is a baseline of audience fatigue baked in. The release date got shuffled around, landing it close on the heels of another major animated tentpole and diluting the family audience. And the broader July marketplace has been soft. None of this is a referendum on the movie itself. It is simply the reality that even a franchise-best critical reception cannot always overcome a crowded calendar and the law of diminishing returns. History suggests the merchandising alone will make Universal whole regardless.

Film Specifications

Detail	Information
Title	Minions & Monsters
Year	2026
Director	Pierre Coffin
Co-Director	Patrick Delage
Screenplay	Pierre Coffin and Brian Lynch
Producers	Chris Meledandri, Bill Ryan
Composer	John Powell
Studio	Illumination
Distributor	Universal Pictures
Voice Cast	Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr, George Lucas
Runtime	90 minutes
MPA Rating	PG
Premiere	Annecy International Animation Film Festival, June 21, 2026
US Theatrical Release	July 1, 2026
Formats	Standard, RealD 3D, Dolby Cinema

Disc Specifications are not yet available. Minions & Monsters is currently in its theatrical window. This section will be updated with the full 4K UHD and Blu-ray technical breakdown once Universal announces a home video street date.

Looking Ahead to the Home Release

Since a good chunk of our readership is here for the disc rather than the ticket stub, let me set expectations on when and how you will be able to own this one. As of this writing there is no announced 4K UHD or Blu-ray street date, which is entirely normal for a film that has been in theaters for less than a week. Illumination and Universal titles typically observe a healthy theatrical run before physical media surfaces, so patience is the order of the day.

The streaming picture is a little more complicated than usual, and it is worth understanding because it will shape when the disc actually matters. Under Universal’s current arrangement with Netflix for its animated slate, Minions & Monsters is contracted to land first on Peacock for the opening four months of its pay-television window, then migrate over to Netflix for the following ten months, before eventually circling back to Peacock. That kind of split-custody streaming deal makes the physical release the only truly permanent home for the film, which is exactly the argument this publication has been making for years. Discs do not expire when a licensing window closes.

When the 4K UHD does arrive, this is a film with real demo potential. A computer-animated feature this new will be sourced from a pristine digital intermediate, which should translate to reference-grade clarity, and the period Old Hollywood palette plus the monster-movie climax give both the video and the Dolby Atmos track something to flex. John Powell’s orchestral score should sound tremendous in a proper home theater. We will have the full technical teardown, extras rundown, and a revised scorecard covering Video, Audio, and Extras the moment a disc lands on the desk. Watch this space.

The Verdict

Minions & Monsters is the rarest of animated-sequel creatures: a seventh entry that justifies its own existence. It is the best-reviewed film the Despicable Me empire has ever produced, and it earns that distinction on the strength of a first half that is genuinely inspired, a voice cast operating well above the material’s pay grade, and a beating heart that loves cinema so openly it is difficult to stay cynical about it.

It is also a film that cannot quite sustain itself, one that squanders a perfect premise on a monster-mash third act indistinguishable from a dozen other kid-flick climaxes. The two halves never fully reconcile. But at a lean ninety minutes, the good outweighs the middling, and the film’s closing argument for the sanctity of the moviegoing experience is sincere enough to send you out of the theater smiling instead of shrugging.

If you have spent years rolling your eyes at these little yellow gremlins, this is the one that might, against your will, earn a begrudging nod of respect. And if you are the sort of viewer who keeps a shelf of restored silent comedies and boutique-label monster movies within arm’s reach, well, this one was practically made as a valentine to you. Just be ready to forgive it when the monsters show up.

Minions & Monsters is playing in theaters now. A 4K UHD and Blu-ray review will follow when the disc is released.