Minions & Monsters

Seven films and $5.6 billion in global box office deep into the Despicable Me franchise, Minions & Monsters sends the yellow creatures back roughly forty years to Hollywood's monster-movie golden age — a 1930s setting that gives the animators a genuinely different visual palette to play with. The voice cast is unexpectedly serious for a Minions movie: Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, and Jesse Eisenberg join Pierre Coffin's usual gibberish. It was originally slated for 2027 and got moved up to fill the release date Shrek 5 vacated — a scheduling accident that puts it right at the summer's midpoint on July 1. Expect competent, familiar chaos rather than a reinvention.