TEHRAN – The Iranian Artists Forum (IAF) in Tehran will screen the 2026 American animated period comedy film “Minions & Monsters,” directed by Pierre Coffin, on Thursday.

Produced by Universal Pictures and Illumination, it is the third installment in the “Minions” prequel series and the seventh overall installment in the “Despicable Me” franchise. 

The film stars Coffin as the Minions, alongside Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, and Phil LaMarr. 

Taking place before the events of “Minions” (2015), “Minions & Monsters” introduces the audience to an entirely new tribe of Minions, who find themselves in Hollywood at the dawn of cinema. Our heroes are two brand-new Minions: James and Henry. We meet them and their rambunctious friends in the distant past and witness their trials and tribulations as they search far and wide for an evil master to serve. Eventually they reach the 1920's, and wind up crashing a Hollywood film set. Their brief and accidental appearance on camera pays off and before they know it the Minions are bona-fide movie stars. 

Then they fall in love with making movies and want to make an awesome monster movie of their own. With the help of a spell book taken from an old boss (an evil sorcerer they used to work for), James and Henry summon some fearsome monsters to play the villains in their movie. When things go haywire, James, Henry, and all their buddies must work together to save the world from a band of rampaging monsters.

“Minions & Monsters” premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival on June 21 and was theatrically released in the United States on July 1. The film was a box office success, grossing $494 million worldwide, becoming the tenth-highest-grossing film of 2026.

The film received positive reviews, with many deeming it to be the best in the franchise since the first film. On the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, 89% of 180 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.9/10. The website's consensus reads, "The Minions bring their penchant for mayhem to Hollywood history in this affectionate and charming sendup of moviemaking magic, turning out the franchise's most roundly enjoyable entry yet." It is currently Illumination's highest-rated film on the website. Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, gave the film a score of 70 out of 100, based on 30 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A–" on an A+ to F scale.

Minions are a fictional all-male species of yellow capsule-shaped creatures that appear in Illumination's “Despicable Me” franchise. Their first appearance was in “Despicable Me” (2010), where they serve as the henchmen of the film's protagonist, a supervillain named Gru. The Minions are characterized by their comedic behavior and their fictional language named Minionese, which is largely unintelligible.

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