Almost a decade since they first broke free from the grip of the film framework of Cursed Me to become stars in their own right, the Minions have returned once again to conquer global cinema. Not content to just sit back and watch a series of eerily smooth testicle creatures chatter about bananas without properly celebrating the occasion, the release of Minions: The Rise Of Gru also saw teenagers dressed up in costumes for the film in a new viral gimmick .
Variety took a look at this trend — which is gathering on TikTok and Twitter under the hashtag #Gentleminions — and interviewed one of the first people to take part in it. Bill Hirst lives in Sydney, Australia and, when The Rise Of Gru opened in the country two weeks ago, posted a TikTok showing him and a group of friends heading to the theater in costume, shaking hands, fingers tucked under their chins as they sitting waiting for the film to start and stoically submits after applauding its credits.
Hurst says one of his friends saw another video of the trend when it was still starting and decided to do it “just for fun.” Since his class “had our formal literally a few days before,” they were well prepared to dress up. When they arrived at the theater, Hearst’s group of 15 were greeted by eight other guys doing the same thing, which apparently continues to happen when people go to the movies.
A case in point is a teenager from Maryland named Obi, who, like Hearst, saw a video of the trend and participated in it with a few friends before coming across another group that also dressed for the film. Their fateful encounter was documented on TikTok and Twitter.
Theater owners reacted in opposite ways to these large gatherings of Gentleminions. In the UK, their presence at screenings of The Rise Of Gru was disruptive enough that managers restricted ticket sales. In North America, at least so far, theaters have handled the marketing punch more than well. (Universal Pictures, for its part, issued an all-lowercase, first-person #BrandTweet saying “we see you and we love you” to those coming to the movie in costume.)
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In an attempt to explain why exactly the Gentleminions trend has taken off, Variety points out that young men are the main demographic buying movie tickets right now and that their age group – “seven-year-olds when the first Despicable Me hit theaters in 2010 Mr. [and] now around the age of 19″—are still prepared to go see the film. Obie and Hearst agree, the former Gentleminion says his generation “now has the nostalgia and enough money to watch [a new Minions movie] ourselves’ and are ‘willing to do it our own way’.
This makes sense, and—coupled with several explanations for their popularity—leads us to the somewhat alarming conclusion that minions as a concept not only refuse to go away, but actually grow in cultural power with each passing year.
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