Will There Be a Live-Action DESPICABLE ME Movie?
By Movieguide® Contributor
Chris Renaud, the creator of the DESPICABLE ME universe, revealed his thoughts about whether he would want his franchise to make the jump to live-action or not.
“I hope not. That’s my answers,” Renaud said. “I mean if there were conversations like that, I haven’t been privy to them. But for me, what defines the world is that it is animated and it allows us to get away with what we get away with.”
“Like, locking a minion in the vending machine, or, you know, blowing up Gru when he attacks Vector. These are really cartoon ideas, like what would have been in a Bugs Bunny cartoon,” he continued.
“I think it just becomes something completely different if you do a live-action version. For me personally, not very appealing,” Renaud added. “But again, who knows what can happen but that’s my personal feeling about it.”
Though Renaud is the creator of the franchise, because Universal Pictures owns the property, it ultimately has the final say on a live-action remake. Though there are currently no public plans for a live-action DESPICABLE ME or MINIONS, that does not mean there will never be one.
Disney has turned nearly a dozen of its most popular animated movies into live-action remakes in the past decade. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ALADDIN, MULAN, THE LION KING, THE LITTLE MERMAID and more have all received this treatment. The company, more recently, has been eyeing movies made more recently such as LILO & STITCH and MOANA.
Expert animators, however, believe that some stories only work in an animated world, and if they were brought to real life, our brains wouldn’t accept them.
“This might bite me in the butt for saying it, but it sort of bothers me,” Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer, Pete Docter told Time Magazine when asked about live-action remakes. “I like making movies that are original and unique to themselves. To remake it, it’s not very interesting to me personally…So much of what we create only works because of the rules of the [animated] world.”
“So if you have a human walk into a house that floats, your mind goes, ‘Wait a second. Hold on. Houses are super heavy. How are balloons lifting the house?’ But if you have a cartoon guy and he stands there in the house, you go, ‘Okay, I’ll buy it,’” Docter continued. “The worlds that we’ve built just don’t translate very easily.”
While Disney still has the option to create a live-action DISPICABLE ME, it currently has no reason to do so. With the help of this year’s DESPICABLE ME 4, the franchise crossed $5 billion total at the box office — a feat no other animated franchise has done. Disney also recently announced MINIONS 3 is in the works, with a target release date of June 30, 2027.
Movieguide® previously reported:
A new MINIONS movie is in the works! The Illumination sequel MINIONS 3 is set to come out June 30, 2027.
The film will be written by Brian Lynch and directed by Pierre Coffin, who also voices the minions.
The DESPICABLE ME and MINIONS franchise is the highest-grossing franchise in animation history, earning around $5 billion throughout its six-movie run.
The latest installment, DESPICABLE ME 4, proves that fans still love the franchise.
“DESPICABLE ME 4 loomed large at the international box office, earning a mighty $88 million to top charts. The animated sequel’s global haul now stands at $437.8 million,” Variety reported. “The DESPICABLE ME series of movies became the first animated franchise in history to cross the $5 billion mark.”
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