Minions & Monsters Opens Wednesday in the Slot Shrek 5 Walked Away From. The Surprise Is It Got Real Reviews.

Universal moving pieces around its animation calendar is routine by now. The surprise is the piece that landed on July 1.

Shrek 5 had that date. It gave it up, sliding first to December 2026 and then out to June 30, 2027, in part to avoid opening five days after Avengers: Doomsday parked itself on December 18. Minions & Monsters, the seventh film in the Despicable Me universe and originally penciled in for summer 2027, took the vacated slot. The two movies basically swapped years. Then one of them went to a festival and walked out with the best notices anyone in this franchise has seen.

Minions & Monsters opens wide on Wednesday, July 1.

What it actually is

This is the first feature Pierre Coffin has directed by himself. He co-directed every previous Despicable Me and Minions film, and he still voices all of the Minions, that babble of toddler noises and broken European languages. Handed full control, he made a period comedy about the movies.

The setting is 1920s Hollywood, right as silent film is about to give way to sound. Two Minions, James and Henry, fall into the studio system, wreck the shoot of a singing-cowboy western, and turn into overnight silent-comedy stars once the studio bosses decide the chaos is a selling point. Then sound arrives, the Minions can only produce gibberish, and the career ends almost as fast as it started. The voice cast around them is stacked: Allison Janney as a studio-tour guide who narrates the framing story, Christoph Waltz as the European director they torment, Jeff Bridges as the money men, plus Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch, and Trey Parker. There is a George Lucas joke. It runs 90 minutes, it is rated PG, and John Powell wrote the score.

The reviews are the news

A Minions movie does not usually get reviewed like this. It premiered as the opening film at the Annecy animation festival on June 21, and the writeups treated it as an actual movie. Variety's Guy Lodge called it "a clear peak for the series" and signed off with "It's almost bellissima but it's fully, madly moviosa." TheWrap's Drew Taylor read it as a love letter to old Hollywood and to the act of sitting in a dark theater with strangers.

The film knows its history and shows the receipts. Lodge catalogs the pastiche: "Modern Times," "Safety Last!," an out-of-period "Citizen Kane" gag, a fake poster for a Minions thriller called "Look Behind You, and Then Down." The first stretch, with the Minions as silent stars, is the part critics keep pointing to. The back half, which hands the plot to a cowardly robot named Dort and a build-your-own monster movie, is where the praise cools and the thing starts to feel like a Minions movie again. Lodge said as much in print.

Into a market Toy Story 5 already owns

The timing is the gamble. Toy Story 5 opened two weekends ago to $160 million, the biggest debut of the year, and it has not given up first place. Dropping a second animated tentpole into the same few weeks means two of the loudest brands in family movies are fighting over the same minivans. Universal likes those odds. It has made the summer-animation bet pay before, with Despicable Me, Super Mario, and How to Train Your Dragon.

Whether "Moviosa" becomes the word kids scream at each other through August is the studio's wager. They moved a Shrek to find out.