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Bruce Hall: Good animated family features have been slim pickings so far this year. Escape from Planet Earth was a modest success, with audiences giving it a solid "meh". The Croods opened well in March, ultimately performing to the point where people started talking about a franchise. Epic probably did not get anyone fired. And Monsters University was always going to be the first animated release of the year to come with serious advance expectations. That gives us a little less than one significant animated family feature a month since March, and only one marquee title. I don't have any statistics with me but I do have a couple of kids, and although they do not believe it, I also used to be one. Tots are usually aware of these films before their parents are, so I have to believe here's space for more activity in this space earlier in the year.

Then again, if you mess around and over saturate the market, it makes events like OPENING JULY FOURTH WEEKEND so much less worthy of all caps. And didn't Universal make this an event? The only thing that got the wee ones to shut up about Monsters University was this - and we don't even have cable. I can tell you firsthand the marketing push behind this it paid off big. Universal is on a winning streak right now, and their strategy for this awkwardly titled movie just extends their dominance.

I suppose this is where they ruin it by dropping six more Fast and Furious movies by 2016, but we can talk about that when it happens.

Reagen Sulewski: It is beyond amusing to me that a lot of the post-4th writeups have taken the tone of Despicable Me "upsetting" The Lone Ranger, when anyone paying the slightest bit of attention for the past month could see that this was in the works. The first Despicable movie was not just a sizable hit in first run but a *monstrous* hit on video. I estimate that my child alone saw it approximately 357 times - and here's the important part - and I never really got that tired of it either. Give parents something that they won't hate themselves for seeing with their children and you will make immense amounts of money.

Max Braden: Honestly, my memory of the first Despicable Me was that it was pretty boring. Gru is a boring character. But my takeaway was that I loved the minions and would have liked to see more of them. This movie, or at least the advertising for it, delivered on that. Gru seems to be no more than a foil for the Three Stooges-esque behavior from the minions, and this movie probably could have just been called Adorable Minions and have made as much money. The promotional crossover I saw was everywhere, and audiences ate it up.

David Mumpower: Before replying in earnest, I went back into BOP's brobdingnagian archive to examine our comments about Despicable Me. At the time, several of us noted the same premise. The ubiquity of the Minions proved to be a marketing masterstroke. There were seemingly innocuous tie-ins as disparate as Denny's Grand Slam breakfasts (no, really) and Best Buy sales circulars. At the time, there was conjecture about how much money Universal was wasting for a solo animated movie release. As we stated then, the strategy employed was to differentiate Minions from all the other potential toy dolls debuting in movies in 2010. Over the week of July 4th, those seeds bore fruit.

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