‘Minions & Monsters’ Just Scored an Impressive CinemaScore With Audiences

Illumination has built an entire empire on the backs of small, babbling, yellow creatures, and the studio’s latest gamble may have just delivered its biggest creative win yet. ‘Minions & Monsters‘ hit theaters on July 1, marking the seventh installment in the Despicable Me universe and the third standalone chapter built entirely around the Minions themselves.

Directed once again by Pierre Coffin, who also voices every single Minion in the film, the movie sends a new pair of characters named James and Henry stumbling into 1920s Hollywood after their tribe’s usual search for a villainous boss goes sideways yet again. What follows is a story about the pair chasing stardom during the silent film era, only to pivot toward making their own monster movie once talkies threaten to end their careers.

That premise has resonated with early audiences in a big way. ‘Minions & Monsters’ debuted with an A minus grade on CinemaScore, a strong signal for a franchise that has historically leaned on younger viewers rather than universal crowd approval.

That audience response lines up with an equally striking reaction from critics, who have been far kinder to this entry than any previous Minions release. The film currently holds a 91 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, marking the highest score for any Illumination movie in the studio’s sixteen-year history, surpassing even the original ‘Despicable Me’ from 2010.

Much of that praise centers on how deeply the film leans into classic Hollywood iconography, opening with a rewind of the Universal logo back through its earliest silent era design before launching into a story stuffed with homages to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and the golden age of moviemaking. Reviewers have repeatedly compared its structure to films like ‘Singin in the Rain’ and Damien Chazelle’s ‘Babylon,’ praising how unexpectedly earnest the film gets about its love for cinema itself.

The voice cast helped fuel plenty of that goodwill too, with Christoph Waltz playing a film director mentor figure, Jesse Eisenberg voicing an alien robot invader named Dort, and Trey Parker taking on a summoned creature called Goomi who becomes central to the film’s back half. Jeff Bridges, Allison Janney, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, and Phil LaMarr round out a cast that also includes a surprise cameo from filmmaker George Lucas playing himself.

Not every reaction has been uniformly glowing, with several critics noting the film loses some momentum once its monster movie plot fully kicks in during the back half, shifting away from the sharper Old Hollywood satire that defines its opening stretch. Even those more mixed reviews have generally still ranked it as the strongest entry the Minions spinoff series has produced to date.

Illumination heads into this release with genuine box office momentum behind it, given that the Despicable Me franchise as a whole has generated nearly 2 billion dollars domestically and more than 5.6 billion dollars worldwide across its previous six films. The two prior standalone Minions movies performed especially well in this same early July window, with 2015’s original opening to 115.7 million dollars domestically and 2022’s ‘The Rise of Gru’ opening to 107 million dollars.

‘Minions & Monsters’ now heads into the crowded July 4th holiday frame carrying strong reviews and a healthy CinemaScore in hand, positioning it to potentially lead the weekend outright. With franchise films in this series historically landing around a 325 million dollar median domestic total, this latest chapter looks well positioned to keep that streak alive.

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