Hmm. Comfortably the stars of the original Despicable Me were the wonderful, gleeful minions, characters who were held back in enough reserve to make their screen time really work. Despicable Me 2 is arriving next year, too, and already the minions are fronting the promotional material for that, as you might expect.
However, it's now been revealed that the minions are set to get a spin-off movie all to themselves. This is the bit that rings a quiet alarm bell. There's an inherent danger in taking supporting characters, as good as they are, and moving them to the centre of a story. The minions didn't have to do any storytelling, and were merely there to provide comedy relief. In much the same way as Scrat in the Ice Age movies, in fact.
Can the minions sustain a feature of their own? That remains to be seen, and it could be a tough job to do so without diluting what made them work in the first place.
Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda (Despicable Me and The Lorax respectively) are directing, and the minions movie is set for release in the summer of 2014.
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