Now that Minions & Monsters is the latest 2026 movie release to take a banana at the summer box office, a long-standing question I’ve had about the franchise has once again resurfaced: "Why aren’t there female Minions?" Pierre Coffin, who is the voice behind the Minions themselves and the director of multiple movies in the series, has big opinions on the subject.
The Minions have been causing chaos in Despicable Me and Minions movies for over 15 years now, but I've noticed not once has a girl minion shown up. Coffin has been behind the yellow ones since the beginning, and has now helmed five movies, with Minions & Monsters being the latest. When asked about the prospect, he had a pretty blunt take, noting:
I think a female Minion would be the beginning of the end.
As Coffin told The Guardian, he’s not on board with female Minions, but he does think it's possible we could see them in the future, though his reasoning had more to do with supposed marketing than his personal preference.
Universal would want to do it because they’d think it would please all the women out there. But I’m not convinced. If I were a woman, I’d think it was tokenistic. I’m not saying we’re not gonna do it or not try, but maybe it’s not meant to be. Or maybe it is! Who knows.
The Minions were created for the first Despicable Me film out of necessity for the story to have some comic relief to foil the character of Gru. The little guys have since become a phenomenon and main characters in their own right across a trilogy of Minions movies, but they've remained just that, little guys.
Which brings me to the other question adult fans have often: How do Minions procreate? The answer is, well, they don't.
We did play around with the idea of having the Minions land on this island where there was another tribe who were all, apparently, female. But it didn’t go further than that. In my head, female Minions would look exactly the same as male ones. And in terms of how they breed: they don’t. They just are.
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Now, this is interesting. Back when Pierre Coffin and his Minions collaborators were working on the first spinoff film, apparently they did kick around the idea of female Minions, but ultimately decided against it. I'm normally all for adding more ladies into movies, but I do think he makes a great point about there being little reason for them to exist, and as that phrase goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
When the same question was asked of Pierre Coffin back in 2015, I liked his reasoning, too. He said girl Minions don’t exist because he “couldn’t imagine” it because of “how dumb and stupid they often are.” And hey, if Minions don’t reproduce how humans do, it really wouldn’t make sense for male and female versions to exist in the first place!
Regardless, the latest installment in this franchise, Minions & Monsters, is now in theaters, and it’s been earning rave reviews for being “purely enjoyable” and “a welcome return to form”. While it's opening was a bit lower than projected, it was still very much No. 1 during the Fourth of July holiday weekend in the U.S.. With how popular the Minions have been over the years, you never know what new things we'll learn about them next.
