Pierre Coffin's Minions & Monsters arrived for the Fourth of July holiday carrying Illumination's highest critical score in studio history and posted the franchise's lowest domestic opening. The seventh entry in the Despicable Me series, the film pits the yellow Minions against a roster of classic movie monsters voiced in part by Trey Parker, and earned a 91 percent score on Rotten Tomatoes. That figure sits eleven percentage points above the previous franchise high, set by the original Despicable Me in 2010.
At the domestic box office, the picture took in an estimated $39.5 million over the standard three-day frame and approximately $65 million across the full five-day holiday stretch, according to Screen Rant and Deadline. By comparison, the two preceding holiday-frame entries each crossed $120 million in five days: Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) and Despicable Me 4 (2024). The current entry's opening represents the lowest five-day debut in franchise history.
Coffin co-wrote the screenplay with Brian Lynch. Overseas, the film added roughly $100 million to its global total, according to Deadline, against a reported production budget of $85 million.
Several factors tempered the domestic reception. The Fourth of July landing on a Saturday concentrated audiences on outdoor holiday plans rather than theaters. Disney/Pixar's Toy Story 5, well into its theatrical run, continued drawing the same family demographic. Analysts also point to franchise duration: the Despicable Me property turns 16 this year and has released at a pace of roughly one film every two years.
Whether the critical consensus translates to long-term theatrical performance remains to be seen. As Eastern Herald observed on July 2, the studio "has the reviews it wanted and not quite the opening it expected, and it will not know for weeks which of the two turns out to matter more."
