Variety looked into this trend—which is being picked up on TikTok and Twitter with the hashtag #Gentleminions—and interviewed one of the first people to take part in it. Bill Hirst lives in Sydney, Australia, and when The Rise Of Gru opened in the country two weeks ago, he posted a TikTok showing him and a group of friends heading to the theater in costume, shaking hands, wagging fingers them under the chin while sitting waiting for the film to start and stoically filing after clapping its credits. Hirst says one of his friends had seen another video of the trend when it was still in its infancy and decided to do it “for fun”. Since his class “had our formal just days before,” they were well prepared to dress up. When they got to the theater, Hirst’s group of 15 met eight other kids doing the same thing, which apparently continues to happen when people go to the movies. A case in point is a teenager from Maryland named Obie, who, like Hirst, had seen a video of the trend and joined in with some friends before meeting another group also dressed for the film. Their fatal attack was documented on TikTok and Twitter. Theater owners reacted in opposite ways to these large gatherings of Gentleminions. In the UK, their presence at screenings of The Rise Of Gru has been disruptive enough that managers have curtailed ticket sales. In North America, at least so far, theaters have been more than okay with the marketing ploy. (Universal Pictures, for its part, issued a first-person, all-caps #BrandTweet saying “we see you and we love you” to those who come to the movie in costume.) G/O Media may receive a commission UNDER $1 99¢ Prime Video Channels Prime contentAdd Showtime, Starz, Paramount+, Discovery and more to your Prime Video account for less than $1 each for the first two months of your subscription. Trying to explain why, exactly, the Gentleminions trend has taken hold, Variety points out that young men are the primary demographic for movie tickets right now, and that their age group—“seven-year-olds when the first Despicable Me hit theaters in 2010 [and] now around the age of 19″—are ready to go see the film anyway. Obie and Hirst both agree, the former Gentleminion saying his generation “now has nostalgia and enough money to see [a new Minions movie] on our own’ and ‘we’re willing to do it our way’. This makes sense, and—combined with several explanations for their popularity—leads us to the somewhat troubling conclusion that Minions as a concept not only refuse to go away, but actually grow in cultural power with each passing year. Send Great Work, internet tips to [email protected]
