- Clothes don’t make a gentleman — it’s all in how you act.
Minions — love them or hate them, the yellow little gremlins have become as much of a popular media mainstay as anything else. Moms of Facebook seem to adore these things, and even people who loathe them get a kick out of sharing anti-Minion memes.
The latest movie featuring the yellow menaces — Minions: The Rise of Gru — hit movie theaters on July 1. With it emerged a new, bizarre group of Minion lovers.
We’re talking about teenage boys and young men dressed in dapper suits. Inspired by “Gentleminion” memes circulating on TikTok and Instagram, the well-dressed gentlemen have flocked to theaters to see the new Despicable Me spin-off.
Unfortunately, their behavior hasn’t exactly matched their gentlemanly look. Movie theaters in the UK have reported a number of disturbances caused by the suited crowds, from loud hooting and hollering during the film to straight-up vandalism.
And so, the theaters have had to resort to drastic measures. Many have outright banned any smartly-dressed young men from seeing Minions: The Rise of Gru.
Occasionally, even just a button-down shirt has been enough to block people from the movie. This has led to some people unaware of the meme being kicked out of a showing.
Come on, guys. If you’re going to dress like a gentleman, you should also behave like one.
‘Absolutely Heartbreaking’
Perhaps the most egregious case of well-dressed disturbance came from the island of Guernsey in the English Channel. Mallard Cinema, the island’s only movie theater, had to stop showing Minions: The Rise of Gru altogether.
Daniel Phillips-Smith, the theater’s manager, said he’d never had to pull a movie before. The cancellation had resulted in what he described as a “massive financial impact.”
“[We’ve had] multiple large groups in almost every screening — so it’s got to have been at least 100 or 200 across the weekend,” Phillips-Smith told the BBC.
“It’s been absolutely heartbreaking. We’ve had families who won’t even go back into the screen when we’ve tried to sort it out, families leaving before the film has even started and, of course, the children have been in tears,” he added.
According to Phillips-Smith, the well-dressed hooligans have thrown things and sworn loudly during screenings. They’ve also gotten into altercations with other moviegoers and vandalized property in the theaters.
But Guernsey isn’t the only place that has had issues. In the mainland UK, the Regal Cinema in Wadebridge, Cornwall, banned “unaccompanied children wearing suits” from Minions screenings.
“We were trying to talk to people on the way in after a while, but that wasn’t really getting anywhere … We had to just decide to put a stop to it and say thanks very much. [There were] people coming in with children for their first cinema trip ever and we wanted to protect that, really,” the theater told the BBC.
Multiple theaters of the Odeon chain have also banned suit-wearing moviegoers. Several Twitter posts show a sign at an Odeon theater’s door, reading: “Due to recent disturbances following the #GentleMinions trend, any group of guests in formal attire will be refused entry for showings of Minions: The Rise of Gru.”
For the Sake of Laughs
But what’s going on? Why are teens putting on their finest clothes and heading off to see a movie they probably don’t actually really care about?
The answer is, for the memes. Minions: The Rise of Gru is the first Despicable Me film in five years, and in late June people on TikTok started joking about dressing up for the occasion when going to see the film.
Of course, as is usual with TikTok, you can’t just leave these things as jokes. On July 1, videos tagged #Gentleminions started emerging of suited-up teens going to see the new movie.
Some of the videos show crowds of dozens of young men marching into theaters. According to some of the participants, they’re not necessarily out to cause trouble.
“I’m the world record holder for the mobile game Minion Rush. Therefore, I only felt it was right to hop on the trend as a homage to my success with the game,” Jayden Tries, an 18-year-old from Doncaster, told The Digital Fix.
“There was another group of fine gents there too, suited to the extreme. We formed an alliance and mutual respect for one another’s love for tiny yellow men,” he added.
But when large crowds of young boys and men are in one location, things can get out of hand. And so they have.
Not All Bad
Although some of these gentlemen have behaved in ways that disqualify them for the title, we’d be in the wrong to say that all of them are like that. Some of the young men said they’ve received unwarranted negative attention, simply because they were dressed up.
Some other moviegoers have also had pleasant interactions with the suited crowds. One of them is Stace Woods, a Surrey teaching assistant, who went to see Minions: The Rise of Gru with her children.
She told the BBC that well-dressed youths at the screening she attended were “so much fun” and “so well-behaved.” Woods added that when her children wanted to get a photo in front of a giant poster of Gru, the crowd of teens politely “stopped bowing down and worshipping” it to make room for her kids.
Now that’s how a gentleman behaves.