It’s rare — near impossible — that anyone with the track record of success that Chris Meledandri brings into a room would be so humble. Yet the Illumination founder and CEO closed out our recent chat with a paean to Donna Langley, chair of NBCUniversal and his distribution partner in multiple blockbuster hits, including the Minions and Super Mario franchises.
“When you and I talk a lot about the history of cinema, and the future of cinema, I really believe very strongly in the role Donna Langley plays running Universal — where she makes decisions from her gut in ways that past studio heads we watched operated,” Meledandri tells me. “We’re in a battle, even with this great period right now of uplift in cinema. We are up against the ropes when it comes to determining the future. I don’t think cinema’s going away, but I think that for anybody who loves movies, now is the time to be thoroughly enthusiastic about them. And without that kind of industry leadership — put aside studio leadership — we can’t really affect the future that I know you and I hope to affect.”
Meledandri has done his part well. Of all the great world builders and universe lords in the Hollywood constellation, he stands astride it like a colossus. Having come to Hollywood to pursue a career as a live-action filmmaker in the world of grown-up storytelling, he eventually drifted to the family realm and ultimately animation. At Fox, he created the Ice Age series, which became a monumental smash, spawning four sequels, as well as Robots and Horton Hears a Who!
From there, he went on to found Illumination, which has become an unstoppable powerhouse of animation blockbusters in our business: The Secret Life of Pets and its sequel, the Sing movies, and the Super Mario blockbusters. This spring’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which Illumination co-created with Nintendo, crossed $1 billion and is the highest-grossing movie of the year.
Then there are the Minions. The franchise, which started in 2010 with Despicable Me, spans six movies and more than $5.6 billion in global grosses — the highest total ever for an animated series. The expectation is that Minions & Monsters — the seventh entry under the Minions umbrella, set for release in July — will push the total well over $6 billion.
“I always get asked what distinguishes an Illumination movie from a Pixar movie or DreamWorks or Disney. And there’s no clean answer to that,” he says. “We’re all aspiring to engage and entertain and delight audiences. But I do think that this inner drive to say what’s the most important achievement of a film for an audience — for us, it really is about lifting their spirits.”
Directed by Pierre Coffin, who has co-directed four of the previous six movies in the franchise and voices the Minions characters, Minions & Monsters sends the banana-colored sidekicks to Old Hollywood, where they help launch the movie business as we know it today.
“Every time you set out to tell a new story that is following the continuing saga of characters, you’re looking for something that — when it engages the core group of storytellers — has a jolt of excitement,” Meledandri says.
For the new movie, he wanted it to be unexpected and surprising — so 1920s Hollywood, at the dawn of sound, checked both boxes.
“Not the most obvious place to go with the Minions movie, or quite honestly, an animated film,” he says of the setting. “But it also opened the door for Pierre to acknowledge what has been such an important part of these characters: their roots in the great silent comedians of Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton. So we’re not only celebrating cinema but at the same time we’re able to really honor those specific roots of the minions themselves as great physical comedians who happen to be animated.”
Born in New York, Meledandri, 67, grew up watching grown-up movies from the auteurs of the ’60s and ’70s. “My parents were true cinephiles. So they took us with them to the movies — but it was an entirely selfish process, which was very much of that time,” he says. “Parents weren’t really thinking about what their kids wanted.” Among the movies he saw at the time: Easy Rider and works by Stanley Kubrick (but not A Clockwork Orange).
After graduating from Dartmouth, Meledandri landed his first job: working as an assistant to executive producer Daniel Melnick on 1984’s Footloose. Two years later came his first official credit — as associate producer on Quicksilver with Kevin Bacon. More live-action work followed, including 1993’s Cool Runnings, a breakout hit about the Jamaican bobsled team’s run at the 1988 Winter Olympics. His first studio job was at Fox under Peter Chernin, making him one of several industry-changing execs — Tom Rothman, Jim Gianopoulos, Peter Rice, Dana Walden, David Greenbaum and Matthew Greenfield, among others — to work for and with the legendary studio boss.
“The degree to which the talent that came out of that time and place at Fox is just undeniable,” Meledandri says. “What Peter values the most is supporting individual talents. He’s drawn to them. Because I’ve watched what happened with me. It’s a touch that he has. Because it’s not as if he spends four days interviewing everybody. But he has this ability and this insight to pick people. And then he supports them.”
Meledandri credits the cultural mentorship at Fox in the 1990s for paving the way for so many to succeed in the decades ahead. “There was an expectation of excellence, and I always felt that I was coming in under it,” he adds. “But I think what he valued more than whether or not you were hitting the levels of cultural expectation of that place was your aspiration — if you were striving to try to do your best. I actually think that for him, that was even more important than coming out of the box as an overachiever. So I still marvel at it. I think about it all the time. It’s unquestionably a gift that he had and still has.”
I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Meledandri for years — and his insights about the industry were every bit as thoughtful and inspiring as I hoped. Watch our full conversation above.
