Illumination’s second Minions film sends an eleven-year-old Gru to audition for a supervillain gang in the 1970s, and its long pandemic delay ended in one of 2022’s biggest box-office runs.

Minions: The Rise of Gru is the fifth film in Illumination’s Despicable Me franchise and the second built around the yellow, gibberish-speaking henchmen rather than their boss. It rewinds the story to the 1970s, when Gru is an eleven-year-old living with his mother in a suburban house with a basement lair, already served by a small army of Minions who have signed up to work for him. The film runs 87 minutes and reached American cinemas on 1 July 2022, two years later than planned.

The premise is an audition. The Vicious 6, the supervillain team the young Gru idolises, has just betrayed its own founder, Wild Knuckles, and left him for dead during a heist to steal the Zodiac Stone, an amulet tied to the Chinese zodiac. Now led by the disco-themed thief Belle Bottom, the gang invites applicants to fill the empty seat. Gru turns up, his audition goes badly, and he answers the rejection by stealing the stone and running.

That theft sets off two chases. A Minion called Otto swaps the stone for a pet rock before anyone notices; Gru is kidnapped by a very much alive Wild Knuckles and taken to San Francisco; and Kevin, Stuart and Bob set off to rescue him, picking up kung fu lessons from an acupuncturist named Master Chow along the way. Everything converges on a Chinese New Year parade in Chinatown, where the stone’s power to turn people into zodiac animals comes into play. The outline is deliberately simple: a kidnapping, a rescue and a stolen object, the same skeleton family comedies have used for decades.

The relationship that gives the story its shape is the one between Gru and Wild Knuckles. The ageing crook who kidnaps the boy ends up teaching him the trade, and the two rob the Bank of Evil together before the Vicious 6 come looking for them. It is the closest thing the prequel has to an origin for the grown-up Gru of Despicable Me (2010): a kid whose first mentor is an older villain willing to take him seriously.

Who made it

Kyle Balda directs, with Brad Ableson and Jonathan del Val credited as co-directors. Balda is an Illumination regular: he co-directed The Lorax (2012) with Chris Renaud, and Minions (2015) and Despicable Me 3 (2017) with Pierre Coffin. Ableson came from television animation, where he directed episodes of The Simpsons, and this was his first feature; del Val had been co-director of The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019).

Matthew Fogel wrote the screenplay from a story he developed with Brian Lynch, who had written Minions. Chris Meledandri, who founded Illumination in 2007, produced with Janet Healy and Chris Renaud, and the animation was made at the company’s studio in Paris. Production designer Eric Guillon, who has shaped the franchise’s look since the first Despicable Me, steered the follow-up toward Gru’s childhood when Universal began weighing sequel ideas in 2017.

The pandemic shaped the release far more than the film itself. The Rise of Gru was first dated for 3 July 2020; when the Paris studio closed temporarily that spring, the team carried on working from home and the picture was completed on 1 July 2020. Universal Pictures then moved it twice, first to July 2021 and finally to 1 July 2022, as COVID-19 kept cinemas closed or restricted around the world.

To handle the period and the setting, the studio hired Wade Eastwood and Ric Meyers as creative consultants and brought in Flora Zhao as a consultant on Chinese culture, a sign of how much of the plot leans on kung fu, the zodiac and San Francisco’s Chinatown. The film is dedicated to Madeline Montero, an animator who died while it was in production.

Old voices and new villains

Steve Carell returns as Gru, the role he has voiced since 2010. Pierre Coffin, who co-directed the first Despicable Me films and invented the Minions’ babble, again voices every Minion, Kevin, Stuart, Bob and newcomer Otto included. Julie Andrews is back as Gru’s mother, and Russell Brand voices Dr. Nefario, here running a record shop, for the last time in the series.

The new faces mostly belong to the Vicious 6. Taraji P. Henson voices Belle Bottom, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Jean-Clawed, whose right arm is a giant mechanical lobster claw, Dolph Lundgren is the roller-skating Svengeance, Danny Trejo is the metal-handed Stronghold and Lucy Lawless is Nun-chuck, a nun armed with nunchaku. Michelle Yeoh voices Master Chow, and Alan Arkin plays Wild Knuckles in what became his final film role; he died in June 2023.

Hiring a run of action-film veterans to voice cartoon villains reads as a wink in itself: Van Damme, Lundgren, Trejo and Lawless built their careers on physical screen fights, and here they work only with their voices. Will Arnett and Steve Coogan make brief returns from the main Despicable Me films, and the rapper RZA voices the biker who befriends Otto on the road to San Francisco.

A 1970s jukebox

Music is where the period setting is most visible on paper. The soundtrack album, produced by Jack Antonoff and released by Decca and Verve on 1 July 2022, has contemporary artists covering funk, pop and soul hits of the 1970s. Diana Ross and Tame Impala recorded the lead single, Turn Up the Sunshine, released on 20 May 2022; Kali Uchis covered Desafinado and St. Vincent took on Funkytown.

Heitor Pereira, Illumination’s composer since the first Despicable Me, wrote the score. Its album, released a week after the film, adds Carell and Coffin singing Bad Moon Rising and You Can’t Always Get What You Want. A new version of the Despicable Me theme by Pereira and Pharrell Williams, sung by a children’s choir, is used in the film but appears on neither album.

From pandemic casualty to box-office record

The two-year wait paid off commercially. The film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on 13 June 2022, opened in Australia a week before the United States, and took $107 million over its first three days in North America and $123.1 million across the four-day Independence Day weekend, a record for that holiday. It finished with $940.2 million worldwide against a reported budget of $80 million to $100 million, the fifth-highest gross of 2022.

Part of that run came from an audience nobody had planned for. Within days of release, groups of teenage boys began turning up to screenings in suits, copying Gru’s look, and posting the outings on TikTok under the tag Gentleminions, often to Yeat’s track Rich Minion, written for one of the film’s trailers. The trend started with Australian high-school students; some British cinemas turned away suited groups after disruptive screenings, and audience polling put about a third of US ticket buyers between 13 and 17, an unusually high share for an animated film. In China, meanwhile, the theatrical cut replaced the closing scene with a caption saying Wild Knuckles had been arrested and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Awards attention stayed within the animation and family circuit: four Annie Award nominations, a Producers Guild nomination and the Kids’ Choice Award for favourite animated film. The franchise moved on quickly, with Despicable Me 4 in 2024 and Minions & Monsters, directed by Pierre Coffin and released on 1 July 2026. In that run, The Rise of Gru is a short family comedy with a period soundtrack and a mentor story at its centre; its place in the series rests less on reinvention than on timing, as the instalment that arrived just as families were ready to go back to the cinema.