And the film takes on the most symptomatic habit of what has made cinema struggling since the post-covid 19 reopenings: the weakness of the content offered for the family audience. Apart from large machinery Marvel as Spider-Man: No Way Home or Doctor Strange and surprises like Top Gun: Maverickentertainment releases are struggling to find their audience or studios are content to capitalize on already existing firms even if it means exhausting their veins.
Franchise Me, Despicable Me is the perfect example. After two first opuses far from being remarkable but pleasant to watch, the third part took a 180° turn towards badly dosed humor and a genre more focused on music, which the spectators did not really appreciate. (59% positive reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes). Wanting to focus everything on minionsthe popular creatures of his franchise, Enlightenment Entertainment launched a spin-off about little yellow creatures in 2015. Again, big commercial success, but murderous reviews (55% positive reviews). Kind and focused for children, minions however had nothing to tell except to introduce the origin-story of the hero Gru.
A Pandora’s box then opened to continue the saga and here comes this summer in our theaters Minions 2: Rise of Gru which could break records at the box office, failing to win a great critical success since the recipe no longer seems to take.
However, the animated feature shattered expectations for its first weekend of release in the United States (July 2-3) with $108.5 million in revenue. The addition of international receipts mean that the film is already at more than 200 million dollars collected even before its release in some territories where it can work well (France in particular). After the disappointing opening of Lightyear around the 70 million, Minions 2 is further proof that family movies can break box office records. However, the first critical feedback (67% good reviews) could already sound a form of weariness on the part of the public for these cute yellow creatures. In France, Minions 2 will arrive at the cinema for next July 6. In comparison, the first film of the Minions had recorded 6.5 million entries in our French theaters.