Minions: The Rise of Gru, the latest installment in the Despicable Me Cinematic Universe (DMCU), has many of our FYPs looking like a suburban mom's Facebook page circa 2013.
The public has been quick to attribute Minions: The Rise of Gru's runaway success to Gen Z's quirky ironic love for the franchise, demonstrated through the bizarre "Gentleminions" trend, which has young people flocking to movie theaters dressed in formal attire to see the film. The tag "Gentleminions" has over 170 million views on TikTok.
But in reality, like so many trends on the internet, it's a case of effective, targeted marketing.
Minions: The Rise of Gru made more than $125M on its opening weekend, a new Fourth of July weekend box office record, and over the July 16 weekend it surpassed $500M. Behind the scenes, the Minions social team has worked tirelessly to make the franchise and its little yellow creatures, which live to serve an evil villain, once again relevant to Gen Z via their TikTok presence and engagement with fans. The team hopped on a variety of ephemeral viral TikTok trends, from "is it cake?" to "who is your celebrity twin?" and encouraged user-generated Minions content, commenting on Minions-related videos on TikTok to keep the characters relevant on the platform.
We were first introduced to the Minions in Despicable Me in 2010. Since then, Illumination Entertainment and Universal Pictures have successfully kept Minions a part of the zeitgeist with the expansion of the franchise to include the Minions' own movie and endless brand collabs (think Minions tennis rackets with Wilson Sporting Goods and Minions apparel with Uniqlo). But in the five years since the Minions movie came out, their original Gen Z audience has grown up. To draw Gen Z back into the world of bananas and incomprehensible babbling, Illumination and Universal teamed up with the Narrative Group, an advertising agency, to revamp the Minions on young adult turf — TikTok.
"We wanted to make loving the Minions cool again and something that Gen Z could really embrace while maintaining their street cred," Dana Neujahr, the strategist in charge of the social team, told Mashable. While the social team was keeping Minions at the forefront of conversations online, Illumination and Universal commissioned a Gen Z-friendly soundtrack featuring TikTok faves Phoebe Bridgers and Brockhampton.
As much as teen boys and other theatergoers believed the Gentleminions trend was a surreal, original meme, the #gentleminions offer another case study in careful steerage by a billion-dollar brand. Of course, some of that has to do with the Minions themselves.
Minions are no stranger to virality. Writing for the Awl in 2015, Brian Feldman described Minions as the perfect meme. He wrote, "they occupy an odd middle ground as a specific piece of intellectual property unbound from a specific feeling or worldview," which has allowed Minions memes to thrive in seemingly unlikely parts of the internet, like with moms on Facebook. (Minions were so deeply uncool that when Zayn came out as pro-Minion in 2015, it caused uproar among his fanbase.)
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Knowing that Minions memes had become synonymous with Facebook moms, the team had their work cut out for them. They started a Minions TikTok account a year ahead of the Minions: The Rise of Gru release. In just 10 months, @minions boasted 2.5 million followers, which Neujahr attributes to careful content curation and a massive community management effort. "[We were] consistently hitting the FYP by leaning into the nostalgia and connection Gen Z already had to this franchise," said Neujahr. The manufactured ubiquity of the Minions, established years ago, is what allowed them to be so meme-able, along with the ironic appeal of Gen Z reclaiming Minions from Facebook moms.
The team took advantage of the mischievous nature of Minions that lends itself to internet humor in their TikTok presence. "We are always trying to find a way to lean into the subversive nature that the Minions embody," said Neujahr. "That subversive twist that's a little bit devious, a little bit leaning into that prank-like nature, but always doing it in a kind of fun, lighthearted nature which is very true to the brand."
The social team had luck on their side when TikTokkers made the "tickets to Minions: Rise of Gru pls” meme a reality. Inspired by the original, Twitter-based meme, in which users tweeted images of characters and celebrities in suits with the caption "X tickets to Minions: Rise of Gru pls," groups of teenage boys dressed up in suits to watch the film and documented it on TikTok. This Twitter meme first cropped up when The Joker was released in 2019 and has since been recycled for every movie memers are particularly passionate about, but this is the first time it's moved off of the internet and into the real world. Bill Hirst, an 18-year-old in Sydney, Australia, was the first person to upload a video of the trend, but he told NBC News that there was another group in suits at the cinema the same night as him. Hirst set the video to rapper Yeat's "Rich Minion," and the rest is social media history: His video has accumulated nearly 9 million likes.
The social team jumped on Hirst's video and commented, "Here you dropped this 👑👑👑👑👑👑..." which received over 800,000 likes. “We immediately saw other teens going to movies in suits tagging us in their posts and celebrating when we commented on it,” said Neujahr.
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While the trend occurred organically, the marketing agency optimized it by coining the phrase "Gentleminion," a portmanteau of gentleman and minion first used on the Minions TikTok. "On opening day of the movie, as the official send-off and a celebration of the occasion, we posted a video featuring Otto, the new Minion featured in the movie, looking out of a skyscraper at all these suit-clad youth, and the copy that we had said, ‘Bobspeed you gentleminions,'" explained Neujahr. The moniker captured our attention and allowed the trend to be easily tracked, and along the way, as the social team continued to comment on videos of people engaging in the trend, it's spread: People have participated from Singapore to Portugal.
Perhaps it's that "subversive twist" Neujahr identified that emboldens young people to take ownership of the Minions. But in an economy in which brands are constantly battling for our attention on every platform, every Minions TikTok you make promotes the brand, and there's nothing subversive about that.
Topics TikTok
