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In 2010, Illumination Entertainment attempted to follow the trail blazed by Blue Sky Studios, Aardman Studios, Pixar and DreamWorks Animation before them. They entered the saturated field of animation films, knowing full well that their effort could go unrewarded. In the realm of football, fans watch the football. Coaches watch the players. In the movie industry, fans remember the hits. Bean counters remember the failures.

Even with the animation houses that I mentioned above, I could list a series of failures such as Flushed Away, Rise of the Guardians and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole. One may conclude that putting “Guardians” in the title of an animated movie could be a cursed action. That is the silly evaluation. The accurate one is that even projects that look wonderful on paper sometimes fail to a spectacular degree. Do you remember Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas? Of course not. Does Mars Need Moms? Hell no. If I told you there was a movie entitled Quest for Camelot, would you believe me? Movie history is littered with these instances of failure. There is something in our nature that forces people to remember the winners more than the losers, all other things being equal.

Despicable Me was a winner.

The movie was released in July of 2010. Its opening weekend of $56.4 million represented the second best debut of the year by an original property, trailing only Inception. At the time, I attributed its popularity as follows: “In the end, Universal Pictures effectively bought the opening weekend by making the aforementioned Minions omnipresent. If you pull up Facebook, there they are. If you go to Best Buy, there they are. If you turn on a television, well, you get the point. And the key is that they're adorable. If they were annoying and lowest common denominator, the film would have failed, but the marketing campaign correctly deduced how engaging they are as well as the why of it. The advertising understands the heart of the film, and we don't see enough of that these days. This is a tremendous job all around and Universal has earned their well-deserved victory lap here.” And there is the crux of the matter. Minions equal money.

How much money was easy to quantify in 2010. There were nine movies that grossed at least $250 million in domestic box office. Despicable Me was the ninth one with $251.5 million. If we again reduce the discussion to new properties rather than adaptations and sequels, however, the Illumination Entertainment property once more finishes second. Launching a new title is exceptionally difficult in the movie industry. Universal Pictures leveraged an overkill amount of Minion marketing into a $543 million global blockbuster.

A Despicable Me sequel was always an inevitability. Universal Pictures did not invest that much capital in building the Minions brand for only one movie. They cleverly pasted the overalls-clad yellow helpers all over the Best Buy ads not only as a way to market the original movie but also to build broad awareness. The results were glorious. Kids in particular responded to this modern combination of Looney Tunes cartoon physics combined with Three Stooges-flavored random acts of violence. Any time a child is shown a Minions video, they act like they have been hypnotized. The spell cast by the Minions is that binding.

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