Movies

Hordes of Teens in Suits Are Showing Up to the Minions Movie. The Studio, for Once, Did the Right Thing.

How should studios capitalize on meme culture? Very, very carefully.

A young Gru from the Despicable Me movies, flanked by three Minions with popcorn and soda.
Gru and the Minions go to the movies. Illumination Studios

Before I saw the TikToks, I didn’t even know Minions: The Rise of Gru was in theaters last weekend. My friends alerted me months ago that the movie’s soundtrack is stacked, and while visiting my younger cousins in June, the impending release came up a couple of times. But it wasn’t until the first video of sharply dressed young men showed up on my For You page that I realized the day had finally come. Most of the videos follow the same formula: a comically large group of boys in suit and ties, sometimes with bananas tucked into their breast pockets, steeple their fingers and stride into their local movie theater. Meet the GentleMinions.

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Can we credit the #GentleMinions trend for The Rise of Gru’s success? Compared with other movies in the franchise, it certainly seems to have played a role. Over the holiday weekend, The Rise of Gru made more than $219 million worldwide, vaulting it into the 10 highest-grossing movies of 2022, and breaking the box office record for the Independence Day weekend with $125 million domestic. Compared with $72.4 million for 2017’s Despicable Me 3, The Rise of Gru’s opening represents a substantial bump, and while it’s closer to the $115 million of the first Minions spinoff movie in 2015, Gru still made more than any movie in the history of the franchise, which leads me to believe that the GentleMinions—and the hype they started on social media—made a significant contribution to ticket sales. Exactly how significant is difficult to say, but the Hollywood Reporter said an “unusually high” percentage of the audience was between 13 and 17, more than four times the percentage that showed up for Despicable Me 3.

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The popularity of The Rise of Gru was surprising to me for two reasons. First, I felt like I missed the Gen Z memo explaining that Minions were no longer relegated to memes on our moms’ Facebook pages: They’re cool now, not cringe. And second, the last time a movie was turned into a meme this year, it didn’t go very well for that movie. Morbius debuted in April, making less than $40 million on opening weekend and grossed $163.3 million internationally during its initial run. It became the butt of a tidal wave of jokes—people misquoting it, streaming it on Twitch illegally, even compressing the entire movie into a GIF and uploading it to Tumblr. The entire point of the Morbius memes was to not see the movie, but in June, Sony cluelessly misread the joke and rereleased Morbius to 1,000 theaters in the U.S. It flopped again, making only $85,000 on its first night back. I did my part by not going to see it in theaters, and instead gleefully related every update to my Boomer parents over dinner, where we marveled over the ability of memes to sway the opinions and actions of moviegoers my age. So why has the GentleMinions meme gone in the exact opposite direction?

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Part of it has to do with a genuine excitement for Minions. The GentleMinions trend is popular with teenagers and young adults, who have grown up with the Despicable Me franchise. There might be an element of irony in buying tickets en masse to a kids’ movie as a high schooler, but the Minions have been accompanying Gen Z for basically our whole lives. I was 9 years old when the first movie came out, and although it wasn’t my favorite movie at the time, Minion mania swept through my extended family like the smelly gas fired from Gru’s fart gun. The difference between the Morbius flop memes and the GentleMinions trend is that Sony mistook ironic fondness for the real thing. I’m not sure what spurred the utter contempt for Morbius, but between a hypersaturated superhero movie market and disdain for Jared Leto (and his infamously cringey method acting, which he continued in the most petulant manner on the Morbius set by making the crew push him in a wheelchair to the bathroom), Sony would have benefited by watching early reactions online and changing their marketing accordingly.

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On the flip side, Universal Studios’ only attempt to exploit the GentleMinions trend was this tweet, graciously acknowledging these kids who have grown up with their movies and, most importantly, not trying to control the meme. When Sony tried to capitalize on the media hype about Morbius, it had the same out-of-touch vibe as when your parents try to “whip-nae-nae” in front of your friends and you have to scream “get out of my room, Dad!”—except that when your parents act hilariously cringey, it’s usually a bit more endearing than when it’s a massive corporation. The key to a successful meme-based audience booster, it seems, is allowing it to remain an organic phenomenon.

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Although Greta Gerwig’s Barbie won’t come out for another year, there’s already a meme about it: posting a picture of several characters or celebrities with the line “X tickets to the Barbie movie, please.” And while that’s not by any means a new meme—it originated with “tickets to Joker,” and “tickets to Rise of Gru” predated the GentleMinions trend—the Barbie memes focus on people dressed in all pink: for example, the cast of Mean Girls on a Wednesday. One Twitter user wanted to make sure we’re on the same page about wearing pink to the premiere next year (to which I give an enthusiastic yes). So although there’s no Barbie equivalent of #GentleMinions (yet), this meme bodes well for public interest in Barbie. After all, if “tickets to Rise of Gru” was the precursor to the GentleMinions coming out in droves, it’s likely that “tickets to Barbie” will see its own themed outfit trend next year, boosting ticket sales.

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Now, I’m not saying that TikTok trends are the key to saving theatrical moviegoing. Between long-rising ticket prices and the COVID pandemic, there’s been a lot of reasons not to go to the theater. But movie studios that haven’t turned solely to streaming would do well to watch the reaction of their target audience on social media. Part of the fun of GentleMinions is going out with friends: I doubt putting on your homecoming suit and taking a video of yourself sitting on your couch alone for the latest streaming debut would gain the same traction. If the reaction is positive, acknowledge it! Universal’s “we see you and we love you” is a genuinely sweet nod to Gen Z fans without trying to control the narrative.

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On the other hand, if the reaction is negative … well, first of all, don’t misinterpret it. (Does Sony not have any youths on their marketing team? How did they take “it’s Morbin’ time” as a supportive statement?) But also, any time a corporation tries to capitalize on the latest trend, it puts a damper on the fun, and it backfired on Sony in a big way. If your newest movie sparks a meme, let the meme run its course. Don’t redirect it for your own purposes, and definitely don’t try to fake a trend yourself. (I can’t think of something that would turn my generation away more.) And accept that this may be the future of movie marketing. Even if teens are only buying tickets because it’s trendy, they’re still buying tickets.

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