Minions Beats Founding Fathers at the Fourth of July Box Office

This Fourth of July weekend, America’s moviegoers face a choice that says more about us than any political rally ever could: a reverent biopic about George Washington’s early years, or a banana-loving gibberish factory set in 1920s Hollywood.

Young Washington arrives with the full apparatus of a culture-war campaign. Kelsey Grammer makes a direct appeal to viewers during the film’s credits, urging them to scan a QR code and buy tickets for strangers—a tactic borrowed from the playbook of Angel Studios, the distributor behind 2023’s Sound of Freedom. The message is meant to land hard: support this film and you’re defending America itself. Yet here’s the problem: the movie doesn’t really know what America is supposed to be defending. Set in the mid-1750s, before independence was even a conversation, Young Washington offers no coherent political or moral argument. It’s a tame, blandly acted origin story without an origin worth celebrating.

Enter Minions&Monsters, the third film in the spinoff series that nobody expected to become the more historically honest option. Directed by Pierre Coffin and co-written by Brian Lynch and Coffin, the film follows a tribe of Minions arriving in 1920s Los Angeles to find their next evil mastermind—only to discover the movie industry itself. The film is loaded with loving references to cinema’s silent era: Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!, plus tributes to Eadweard Muybridge, Georges Méliès, and the Lumière brothers. When sound arrives and the Minions can’t deliver the florid dialogue of early talkies, the story pivots to something unexpectedly touching: funny-sounding outsiders carving out a place in a transformative industry.

What makes Minions&Monsters the better history lesson—despite its fantastical turn once an alien robot and a Lovecraftian beast enter the plot—is its grasp of something real. The nonsensical“Minionese”that director Coffin has crafted over seven films is actually a polyglot blend of Spanish, French, German, and other languages, delivered with the nasal whine of a record player at the wrong speed. It sounds like what a 1920s movie set actually sounded like: a babble of immigrant voices building an industry that would define American culture to the world. Young Washington, granted, might help middle-schoolers pass a pop quiz (provided it doesn’t ask about slavery or Indigenous people). But Minions&Monsters is more meaningfully true, even if it’s superficially less accurate.

The U.S.’s 250th anniversary isn’t a birthday many feel like celebrating. The official party looks likely to be, as one critic put it, a sweaty, ill-attended bust. But somewhere in the story of outsiders making a home in America through creativity and persistence, there’s something worth cheering for—in whatever words, or nonwords, you choose.