From Facebook moms to TikTok teens, how Minions became cool again

Many of our FYPs are reminiscent of a suburban mom's Facebook page from a few years ago.

Gen Z's quirky ironic love for the franchise, which has young people flocking to movie theaters dressed in formal attire to see the film, has been attributed by the public as the reason for the film's success. Over 170 million people have viewed the tag "Gentleminions" on TikTok.

Like so many trends on the internet, it's a case of targeted marketing.

It made more than $125M on its opening weekend, a new Fourth of July weekend box office record, and over the weekend it made over $500M. Behind the scenes, the social team has worked hard to make the franchise and its little yellow creatures relevant to Gen Z through their TikTok presence and engagement with fans. "Is it cake?", "Who is your celebrity twin?", and other ephemeral TikTok trends were all hopped on by the team.

The first time we saw the Minions was in Despicable Me. The expansion of the franchise to include the Minions' own movie and endless brand collabs has helped keep the franchise alive. The original Gen Z audience grew up after the movie came out. To bring Gen Z back into the world of bananas and incomprehensible babbling, Illumination and Universal collaborated with the Narrative Group, an advertising agency.

Dana Neujahr, the strategist in charge of the social team, said they wanted to make loving the Minions cool again and something that Gen Z could really embrace. Illumination and Universal commissioned a Gen Z-friendly soundtrack featuring TikTok faves, and kept the social team busy.

The #gentleminions offer another case study in careful steerage by a billion-dollar brand.

The Minions have been around for a long time. In 2015, Brian Feldman wrote a piece for the Awl. He wrote that they occupy an odd middle ground as a specific piece of intellectual property unbound from a specific feeling or worldview, which has allowed them to thrive in seemingly unlikely parts of the internet. It caused uproar among his fans when he came out as pro-Minion.

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The team had their work cut out for them because of the popularity of the meme. They opened a Minions TikTok account a year before the release of the movie. Neujahr attributes the 2.5 million followers to a huge community management effort. The FYP was consistently hitting by leaning into the nostalgia and connection Gen Z already had to this franchise. The manufactured ubiquity of the Minions, established years ago, is what allowed them to be so meme-able.

The team was able to use the mischievous nature of the Minions to their advantage. Neujahr said they are always trying to find a way to lean into the subversion of the Minions. It's a little bit devious, a little bit leaning into that prank-like nature, but always doing it in a kind of fun, lighthearted nature which is very true to the brand.

The social team was able to take advantage of the meme when it was created. A group of teenage boys dressed up in suits watched the film and documented it on TikTok, following in the footsteps of the original meme. This is the first time that this meme has moved off of the internet and into the real world, since it first appeared on the social networking site in 2019. The first person to post a video of the trend was an 18-year-old in Australia, but he told NBC News that there was another group at the cinema with him. His video has accumulated nearly 9 million likes, and was set to a song by the artist.

The social team jumped on the video and commented, "Here you dropped this..." which received over one million likes. Neujahr said that other teens went to movies in suits and tagged them in their posts.

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The marketing agency capitalized on the trend by coining the phrase "Gentleminion," a reference to the character from the movie. The moniker captured our attention and allowed the trend to be easily tracked, and along the way, as the social team continued to comment on videos of people engaging in the trend, people have participated from Singapore to Portugal.

Maybe it's the "subversive twist" Neujahr identified that makes young people want to own the Minions. In an economy in which brands are constantly battling for our attention on every platform, every Minions TikTok is promoting the brand.