90 min | PG | July 1, 2026 | Universal Pictures
TLDR: Cute, and weirder than a Minions movie has any right to be. It finally cuts the little yellow guys loose from the Despicable Me machine and mostly gets away with it.
Illumination sends the Minions to 1920s Hollywood, where they stumble into movie stardom, lose it all, and accidentally unleash actual monsters on the world. It sounds like the same gibberish-and-slapstick formula stretched to feature length again. It isn’t. This is the first film in the franchise that treats the Minions as their own creative universe instead of a spinoff engine bolted to Gru. The artifice holds up on its own, which is the genuine surprise here.
Pierre Coffin still voices the entire yellow horde and remains the franchise’s best special effect. The supporting cast earns its paycheck. Trey Parker leans into the monster Goomi with real comic timing, and Christoph Waltz does his silky menace routine in animated form. Jeff Bridges and Allison Janney round out a cast that is frankly overqualified for this material. Nobody phones it in, which matters in a film that lives or dies on vocal energy.
The 1920s setting does real work. The silent-film-era gags give the visual comedy a new texture, and the backstory angle is a genuinely nice touch for characters who have spent five films as pure chaos agents. It gets uniquely weird in stretches, weirder than the franchise has ever allowed itself, and those are the best parts. The plot still sags in the middle the way every Illumination film does, and the monster mayhem finale plays it safer than the setup promises.
This is a formula picture that pushes at the edges of its own formula and finds some room to breathe. Kids get the slapstick. Adults get old-Hollywood jokes and a genuinely strange streak. It is cute, it is disposable, and it is more interesting than it needed to be.