John Powell, the two-time Academy Award nominee for his work on How to Train Your Dragon and Wicked, is set to score Illumination’s Minions & Monsters.
The move reunites the music meister with Illumination, for whom he composed the score to 2023’s Migration and 2012’s The Lorax.
Coming out of the Despicable Me movies, which is the biggest global animated franchise in history, Minions & Monsters in the third spin-off that focuses on the excitable small, yellow little creatures that seem to only exist to serve an evil master.
This one is being billed as “rambunctious, ridiculous and totally true story” of how the Minions conquered Hollywood, became movie stars, lost everything, unleashed monsters onto the world and then banded together to try and save the planet from the mayhem they had just created.
It is also being described as a love letter to classic Hollywood, which will allow Powell to let loose a variety of styles. But he better get a move on as the movie opens July 1.
Minions & Monsters is directed by Academy Award nominee Pierre Coffin, a director of the first three Despicable Me films and the first Minions film. Coffin has also provided the voice for the Minions since their film debut in 2010.
The voice cast includes Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch and Trey Parker, as well as Bobby Moynihan and Phil LaMarr.
Brian Lynch, who worked on Minions as well as Illumination’s The Secret Life of Pets movies, and Coffin wrote the script. Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri and Bill Ryan produce.
Powell began his career writing music for commercials and assisting composer Patrick Doyle before moving to the U.S., where he was mentored by Hans Zimmer and worked alongside Stephen Schwartz on the songs for The Prince of Egypt. His first film was John Woo’s Face/Off.
His numerous credits range from The Bourne Identity and Mr. and Mrs. Smith to Solo: A Star Wars Story and Don’t Worry Darling on the live-action side and from Kung Fu Panda and Bolt to the Ice Age movies on the animation side. He is noted for having written more music for animation than any modern composer, 25 in all (and counting).
He is repped by Kraft-Engel Management.