Aspiring young male fashionistas from all over America were chatting in groups last weekend, exchanging their favourite menswear fits and setting up meetings at the movies. Nevertheless, these crazy men weren’t going to watch Top Gun: Maverick, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, or even Elvis. They had tickets to watch Minions: The Rise of Gru.

This fifth instalment in the Despicable Me series brought in a mind-blowing $125 million over the long Fourth of July weekend, largely due to a wave of young men and boys who grew up with the franchise (the first Despicable Me was released in 2010) and connected over their Gru-stalgia via the TikTok trend #GentleMinions. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the widely replicated hashtag featured videos of young male admirers entering the theatre in a neat line while wearing identical dark suits that resembled the title junior supervillain’s own careful attire.

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The Reporter points out that, compared to the average animated feature, much alone this series, 34% of the movie’s opening weekend audience was made up of viewers between the ages of 13 and 17: Only 8% of the audience for Despicable Me 3 in 2017 belonged to that age bracket. This is what happens when a generation grows up with a property, according to Jim Orr, head of domestic distribution at Universal.

Rise of Gru, the fifth instalment in the Despicable Me series, first caught online attention for its incredibly strong soundtrack of ’70s covers, which includes artists like Brockhampton, Phoebe Bridgers, Tierra Whack, and Gen Z whisperer Yeat, whose new song “Gentle Minions” boasts, “I made a song for the Minions / How much they paid me? One million Cole Bennett contributed to the teen infatuation by creating a modified trailer that has had more than 3.2 million YouTube views since it was uploaded on June 28. A $300 letterman jacket designed in collaboration with the Minions was also made available by Bennett’s Lyrical Lemonade, and it actually kind of awesome. The similarities between Lyrical Lemonade and Minions’ use of the colours yellow and blue are clear.

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When young people from around the world who were early adopters of the #Gentleminions movement were interviewed by Variety, they revealed that they had seen a few videos on the app before deciding to give it a try. They frequently ran into other groups at the same screening who were wearing similar outfits. Teenager Obie from Maryland told Variety, “I feel like some people really assume that adolescent lads are making an effort to see the movie solely to wear suits. “Perhaps some people are engaging in that. However, I’m confident that most members of my generation, who grew up watching the Despicable Me movies, now have enough nostalgia and cash to see it on our own. “We’ll probably want to go about it our own way. Funny how something becomes such a widespread tendency.