Depending on who you ask, Minions are either the best or worst part of the Despicable Me franchise.
In an effort to make turn haters into adoring fans of the small, yellow, incoherent creatures, Universal Pictures is introducing a new Minion: Mel. Unlike the three main bob the minion who hang around Gru (Steve Carell) and help him execute his evil plans, Mel isn’t a fan of the Minions’ forced labor situation. Based on a report from Entertainment Weekly, Mel will lead the uprising of Minions against Gru and fight for their freedom.
To put it less dramatically, the Minions have unionized. They want fair wages for the hours they’re putting in to help Gru take over the world.
The addition of Mel may come as a welcome surprise for fans of the Minion characters, but there is a downside, too. Bob, Kevin and Stuart won’t be a part of Despicable Me 3. This explains why they’re barely in the first trailer and why their involvement in the movie hasn’t been discussed as much as previous films.
“Really, our feeling is that we haven’t seen Kevin, Stuart, and Bob specifically in Despicable Me 1 or 2 anyway, and we wanted to be faithful to the timeline,” co-director Kyle Balda said. “Are they still doing their own thing? Or are they here with Gru and the other Minions? Or, like, is Bob an adult now? We didn’t want to bring that out into the open too much and start to continue a storyline with characters that we hadn’t seen set up earlier.”
Without Stewart, Bob and Kevin, it will be up to Mel to take charge of the Minion situation in the film. Balda described Mel as the first evil Minion, who believes in his fellow yellow-beings and their capability to be enact evil acts on their own without the supervision of Gru. The tension between Gru and Mel will be a heavy focus of the film, Balda added.
“The first value we learned in Minions is that they want to follow a big boss and do crimes, but the thing that’s always ironic is that there’s nothing inherently evil about the Minions,” Balda said. “But they just think they have it in their DNA to go and be villains. And since they’ve ended up destroying every boss they’ve had, part of what makes Gru the chosen one is that he’s able to survive them.
“So what we’re exploring now is, what does that look like years later, when all the history has built up?”
Despicable Me 3 will be released on May 24.
