Posted in: Movies | Tagged: despicable me 3, film, minions

Get Ready For More Memes; We Have A New Minion

Published Sat, 20 May 2017 18:15:55 -0500

There's a new Minion in town and his is Mel. Entertainment Weekly shared a image and description of the new Minion who is going to lead an uprising again their leader Gru (Steve Carell) in Despicable Me 3.

"The Minions have been patiently waiting for Gru to get over this phase of being good, but when that doesn't come to fruition, Mel is the one who can't take anymore and is speaking out, and so all the other Minions get behind him to be like, 'Preach it!'" says co-director Kyle Balda. "He's a character who personifies the voice of objection against Gru's life choices. I think of him as sort of the head of the union. Collectively, the Minions are a character themselves, and it feels stronger when we can pull out an individual personality to rise up."

Mel, who is named after Illumination founder Chris Melendandri, is not like any sort of Minion we've seen so far. While he speaks the same language as the others he's much more independent and believes that they go criminal without having to serve someone else. The Minions aren't really fit for that so they end up in jail. Mel isn't a villain though and the movie aims for not only the Minions to have an active part in the story, not just background comedy, but also their relationship to Gru.

The main core of the relationship between Gru and the Minions has been that they love each other and need each other, but in any long-term relationship, there are quirks and frustrations," says the director. "I think of them as an old married couple. They both have their list of complaints against each other from a long life together, and they have that one argument that goes one step too far but instantly regret it."

No one at Illumination was prepared for the cultural phenomenon the Minions became after the release of the first Despicable Me in 2010. The estimates of the amount of money they lost because they didn't have toys or merchandise is estimated in the millions. While the movie Minions was like a long form origin story for the creatures in Despicable Me 3 the audience is going to learn more about moral driving force of these tiny creatures.

"We learned more about the commitment that the Minions have, and what's the next level of their values," says Balda. "The first value we learned in Minions is that they want to follow a big boss and do crimes, but the thing that's always ironic is that there's nothing inherently evil about the Minions. Their idea of being bad is slapping one another. But they just think they have it in their DNA to go and be villains. And since they've ended up destroying every boss they've had, part of what makes Gru the chosen one is that he's able to survive them, so what we're exploring now is, what does that look like years later, when all the history has built up? The Minions want to lead a life of villainy, but they've imprinted on Gru in a unique way, so what happens when that relationship changes? And you can see that on Mel…just because it's impossible to show that over 500 characters."

What about Bob, Kevin, and Stuart from the 2015 movie are confirmed not to be in this movie. They do have their own sequel in 2020 no doubt with a young Gru that they meet at the end of Minions. The problem is timeline because the last time we saw the trio was the 60's and the Despicable Me movies take place closer to the modern day.

"Really, our feeling is that we haven't seen Kevin, Stuart, and Bob specifically in Despicable Me 1 or 2 anyway, and we wanted to be faithful to the timeline," says Balda. "Are they still doing their own thing? Or are they here with Gru and the other Minions? Or, like, is Bob an adult now? We didn't want to bring that out into the open too much and start to continue a storyline with characters that we hadn't seen set up earlier."

Despicable Me 3 will be released on June 30, 2017.