The French animator had co-directed four films in the Despicable Me universe, the highest-grossing animated franchise of all time with more than $5.5 billion worldwide across six films, and voices every last one of the yellow creatures himself. After Despicable Me 3, he told Illumination founder Chris Meledandri he wanted out. He spent the intervening years working on short films, marketing projects, and the Paris Olympics.
Then Meledandri called with a pitch. A Minion who wants to make a movie about a monster. “When he told me that, I tuned out the monster. I got stuck on the word ‘movie,'” Coffin says. What followed became Minions & Monsters, the third installment in the Minions prequel series and the seventh overall entry in the Despicable Me franchise, set in 1920s Hollywood at the dawn of cinema.
The 1920s setting was Coffin’s own contribution. If the Minions were going to make movies, he reasoned, why not place them at cinema’s industrialization — that liminal moment between craft and industry? The period also suited the Minions’ DNA. “In the way they move, in the way their gags are constructed, they are heirs to silent-film stars — Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd,” he says.
The film marks Coffin’s solo directorial debut in the franchise and the first time he co-wrote the script, working with Brian Lynch. “It’s the first time Chris really let me do my own thing,” he says. The result is the most personal entry in the series — a love letter to the immigrant filmmakers who built Hollywood, with the studio bosses in the film inspired by the Warner brothers and the fictional director Max drawn from Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and Michael Curtiz.
The voice cast includes Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr, and Trey Parker, with Coffin reprising his role as every Minion. Even George Lucas appears after a chance connection got Coffin 30 minutes with him in France.
On AI, Coffin is watchful rather than alarmed. He describes being shown by Trey Parker a technique that applied an iPhone-filmed performance onto an existing character after a set had been dismantled. “For a director, it means you can change acting after shooting, even after a set has been torn down,” he says. “That can save a film in the editing room.” Whether the Minions’ voices could one day be AI-generated, he won’t rule out — but admits he’s probably too close to judge.
Minions & Monsters world premiered Saturday at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the same stage where Coffin debuted Despicable Me sixteen years ago. It opens in U.S. theaters July 1. Box office trackers currently project a domestic run of around $268 million — a competitive summer that includes Toy Story 5 and Disney’s live-action Moana will test whether Coffin’s gamble on his own instincts pays off. He says, with characteristic candor, he doesn’t know. But for the first time in the franchise, he watches the finished film and thinks it’s actually pretty good.
