Gru: Despicable Me 4 has added another great success to the Universal and Illumination film saga, thanks to the more than $400 million that the movie brought in at the box office. In this installment, we’ve seen for the first time the Mega Minions, a group of minions with superpowers reminiscent of The Fantastic Four. Now, their creators have revealed some details about the process of developing these peculiar creatures.
And it’s very nuanced. We must say, it wasn’t the first time the franchise flirted with the idea of giving powers to the minions. In its second installment, we already saw the first traces of them through the evil purple minions. Chris Renaud, director who co-created the minions alongside Guillon and Pierre Coffin, explained to The Variety that they took the sketches from that movie to see “how those designs looked”.
Above all, Renaud wanted the Mega Minions to be simple and archetypal, “not only for the comedy we needed, but also because of the amount of screen time the Mega Minions actually had”. The result was Jerry, shaped like a rock; Dave, who is bulky with small arms; Tim, who has elastic arms; Mel, a kind of Cyclops from X-Men; and Gus, who can fly.
For Renaud, the challenge was to make them fresh figures for the audience. A difficult task, especially considering the saturation of superhero-related themes that we have in series, movies, animation, comics, etc. “Ultimately, we found that the benchmark is the fact that they are minions, which was the way to give them some distinction, despite the breadth of superhero material that has been done”.
