How Many Had To Die So The Minions Could Thrive?
If you were to ask someone in 2o17 to name an obnoxious, unnaturally colored, oddly-shaped, and barely intelligible life form that’s loved by old people on Facebook, there’s a fairly good chance their answer would reference the deformed baby carrot currently occupying the White House.
If you posed the same question in 2015, however, the answer you received would have likely referred to an entirely different entity threatening everything we know about polite society: Minions. ‘
The Minions first entered the public consciousness with their movie-stealing performance in 2010’s Despicable Me, and spent the next few years slowly increasing their stranglehold on pop culture by exploiting small children’s innate inability to resist the allure of of bright colors, funny noises, and slapstick violence. As the laws of nature dictate, the fascination of the most vulnerable generation soon rubbed off on the most vulnerable members of the older ones, and it was only a matter of time before aunts around the world were hopping on social media to post grainy pictures of the jaundiced little pills emblazoned with Impact font warning about the autistic horrors of the polio vaccine.
The hysteria reached a tipping point when their titular movie was released in 2015 on its way to a billion dollar box office haul. The movie itself was met with a mixed critical reception— due perhaps in part to Minions-related fatigue— but anyone coming into the theater looking for the Holy Trifecta of kid-friendly traits mentioned above walked away more than satisfied.
The film traces the origins of the Minions from the primordial soup to around the time of the Summer of Love, and we quickly learn that their mission in life is to serve the most “despicable” being they can find. These masters range from a tyrannosaurus rex to Napoleon Bonaparte. In a particular apropos plot twist, the Minions find themselves exiled for about 150 years after serving the latter, with the film’s main characters conveniently emerging a couple of decades after the end of WWII.
The movie itself is essentially an extended fetch quest, with the Minions being tasked to steal the Queen of England’s crown so that their master can ascend to the throne (which, as we all know, is exactly how that works).
They also kill a bunch of people along the way.
That’s right— it may have been marketed as a kid’s movie, but Minions might have the highest recorded body count of any PG-rated movie I’ve ever seen.
How do I know that? Because I watched it and counted the casualties, which would appear to outnumber those in at least a couple of films in the Jason Bourne franchise.
As you’ll soon see, the Minions aren’t as innocent as they seem.
Note: Because this is a supposedly family-friendly movie, several characters survive incidents that would have surely killed them in real life. In those cases, the deaths have still been counted, even if the character reappears in the movie or— in one case— reappears only to be “killed” again.
One T. Rex
The Minions’ killing spree begins a mere three minutes into the movie when they inadvertently pull a Frodo and cast their leader into the depths of a volcano.
One caveman
The Minions were apparently smart enough to invent a flyswatter at some point during the Stone Age, but apparently not smart enough to know what a fly looked like.
Is there a chance the caveman could have survived this? Sure. But until he grunts his way through a CGI prequel to The Revenant, this caveman is staying in the “Dead” column.
About 35 Egyptians (and one Pharaoh)
There is no way to definitively measure the number of people who were crushed during the christening of the Great Pyramid of Giza (which was stolen 2500 years later in Despicable Me, because the Minions universe is cohesive, endless, and ever-expanding).
An in-depth analysis of the shot above shows the line of Egyptians is about 35 people wide, but in a previous shot, the crowd surrounding the Pharaoh was shown to be two to three people deep, making it impossible to get an actual estimate of the crowd size.
We’ll err on the conservative side and say the body count here was 36
A vampire
For their master’s birthday, the Minions baked this vampire a gorgeous cake and gave him the nicest present any 357-year-old could ask for: the sweet release of death.
Napoleon Bonaparte
I like to think this scene results from a discussion in the writers’ room that contained the phrase “blasted in the ass,” and although the film’s narrator implies Napoleon managed to survive being shot at point-blank range with a cannonball, every other similarly recorded moment in history would suggest a more lethal outcome.
An undetermined number of police officers
It’s difficult to ascertain how many—if any— of the occupants of these police cars suffered fatal injuries as a result of this pileup, which was the result of the accidental firing of a rocket launcher.
With that said, the movie takes place in 1968, and airbags were not introduced into commercially-produced American cars until 1971.
Previous shots show that each of these vehicles contain two police officers, and considering the speed and angle at which the second car hits the first, it would probably be safe to assume the crash resulted in at least two deaths.
A yeti
Having your head pushed inside your body via thousands of pounds of ice is normally not conducive to survival.
The Keeper of the Crown
After murdering their second mythical creature in the film, the Minions somehow manage to go 33 minutes without directly contributing to the death of a living creature.
This impressive streak comes to an end after they encounter the man tasked with guarding the crown they’ve been tasked with stealing. While he manages to survive the initial blast after being thrown into the wall, considering his age and in intensity of the explosion, it’s only a matter of time until the adrenaline wears off and he succumbs to his wounds.
The Queen of England
I’m a bit hesitant to count this as an official death, as the Queen climbs out of the carriage almost immediately after the crash.
However, considering the track record of members of the royal family when it comes to vehicular collisions occurring at high speeds, I can’t help but include this one in the final tally.
The film’s antagonist
After retrieving the crown for Scarlet Overkill, the super villain they serve for the majority of the movie, the Minions inadvertently crush her with a chandelier just moments before she is coronated.
The film would lead you to believe she was able to shield herself with her metal dress, but a careful analysis shows that her head is exposed in the last frame before the collision.
No one has ever been more dead.
One unidentified villain
A posse of villains led by a chainsaw-wielding Juggalo are tripped up by one of their own while pursuing the Minions, and it can be assumed that someone fell onto the chainsaw in the ensuing pileup.
The real question is whether or not that chainsaw would still be running, which is a difficult question to answer. Modern chainsaws are activated by a centrifugal clutch, which stops the chain from spinning when not engaged.
However, a search shows that the first patent for the mechanism for use in a chainsaw was not filed until 1970, which would imply at least one of the villain fell onto a still-running power tool.
While there’s a chance they could have survived, we’ll assume they didn’t.
A barbarian
This Minion managed to pull of the perfect crime when he caused this self-inflicted lantern wound, resulting in the second death via a head being pushed inside a body.
At least 10 henchmen
Towards the end of the movie, one of the Minions is cornered by a group of henchmen in a Scarlet Overkill’s castle. He manages to escape by activating a machine that causes him to grow hundreds of times his normal size, destroying the palace in the process.
Sadly, the men who did the cornering were unable to escape in time, and even if they were able to survive the collapse, it’s unlikely anyone was rushing to rescue them in the rubble.
An unknown number of innocent occupants
In order to save his fellow Minions from being vaporized, Kevin the Giant Minion slaps Overkill through a series of presumably occupied buildings, the last of which collapses (a few Minion conspiracy theorists have claimed was a controlled demolition).
There’s no way to calculate how many people were inside those buildings, so this won’t be added to the final death toll. However, this would appear to be the Minion’s version of the trolley problem— and it’s very problematic.
Scarlet Overkill. Again.
According to the movie, Overkill manages to again use her dress to survive this assuredly fatal blast, but there’s no way she managed to walk away from this Space Shuttle Challengeresque explosion.
The Final Tally
By the time the end credits start to roll, the Minions have managed to kill— at the very minimum— 59 people over the course of their journey.
They may appear innocent on the surface, but the facts show that they’re anything but.
