10 Plot Holes In The Despicable Me Franchise

We all love Despicable Me. Steve Carell putting on a weird accent and pretending to be evil while surrounded by cute yellow guys and his three adoptive daughters. What’s not to like? They all exist in a strange world full of technology that shouldn’t really work and citizens that seem to look the other way about a lot of stuff.

Despite this, there are still a lot of plot holes littered throughout the franchise. Here are ten of our biggest questions about the series.

10 Miss Hattie’s Repeating Pictures

Miss Hattie’s Home For Girls isn’t exactly the nicest place in the world. Miss Hattie herself is anything but caring, flaunting her position of power in order to control the girls she “looks after.”

In the background of her office, Hattie has hundreds of pictures of all the children she has had in her care. It doesn’t really make much sense that it can clearly be seen that certain people’s pictures are duplicated elsewhere on the wall. Take the one in the green jumper and the strange hat, for example.

9 Fake Video Conference?

For some reason, the video conference footage that Mr. Perkins shows Vector is fake. Well, probably not fake, exactly, but it doesn’t match the audience had previously seen. When Perkins was talking to Gru the first time around, only Gru was visible on-screen with the shrink ray and Edith is the only girl seen.

On what viewers are told is footage from that same call, all three kids are present alongside Gru and the shrink ray. Something doesn’t quite add up here…

8 Different Moon Physics

After a variety of things around the world are shrunken down to tiny sizes, it is obviously Gru’s mission to save the earth (despite this basically having been his own plan just a few hours earlier). When he manages it, we see the minion Kevin and the shrunken ship immediately expand back to their actual size.

The moon, however, takes multiple steps before it reaches its proper size. In fairness, the moon is pretty big, so maybe the physics of shrink rays works a little differently when interfering with astronomical objects.

7 How Did Vector Know About The Dance Recital?

Victor Perkins is an interesting man. Despite being portrayed as an innocent, nerdy failure, his powers as a supervillain are quite impressive. He both steals the Pyramid of Giza and interferes when Gru attempts some moon-theft. He also has a really cool house, with a shark in it.

Apparently Vector also has some special, particularly impressive, unexplained power in which he seems to be able to read minds. There is no reason Vector should know about the girls’ dance recital, but he does anyway.

6 Starfish In The Trunk

At the start of Despicable Me 2, Lucy goes to pick up Gru, silently taking him on quite a messy adventure. When they finally arrive at the AVL, he gets out of the trunk of the car with a starfish on his head. While a pretty classic visual gag, the implications of this gag are slightly less amusing.

Technically, if a starfish could get in, then the trunk wasn’t closed in the first place so he could have probably gotten out. More morbid, though, is the fact that if a starfish could get in, then so could water, and Gru should technically have drowned at some point on his journey.

5 Very Wrong Coordinates

Over at AVL headquarters near the start of the second film, footage of a secret lab theft in the Arctic circle is being watched, with coordinates of the location of the footage shown in the corner. You’d think a quick Google would lead the director to some real coordinates which could add a level of realism to the scene.

Nope, the coordinates lead to South Sudan. Yes, South Sudan. Not the uninhabited Arctic circle right at the top of the globe, but one of the hottest countries in the world which is slap bang in the middle of Earth. The coordinates couldn’t be more wrong, really.

4 Even More Wrong Coordinates

This mistake from Despicable Me 3 is almost note-for-note identical to the one above. When we see Bratt take on his ambitious diamond heist towards the start of the film, the coordinates are shown on the screen at the AVL, just like they were in the previous film.

Their error isn’t quite as glaring this time around (as the difference is only between Hollywood and Tennessee, not the Arctic circle and South Sudan), but the franchise could have learned from its mistake the first time around.

3 Lucy’s Power Hands

In this weird world of nonsense and mayhem, it only makes sense that Bratt would have a very powerful weapon: Massive bubblegum bubbles. The Minions attack them with axes, pitchforks, and various power tools, but the bubbles just refuse to die.

Lucy, however, can destroy them with just her hands. Either she quite literally has hands of steel, Minions are really weak, Bratt’s weapon has lost its power, or, most likely, they forgot to keep the strength of the bubble consistent.

2 A Special Cassette Player

The only way to notice this particular plot hole is if someone has an intimate knowledge of exactly how a cassette tape and a cassette player works. During Bratt’s heist at the beginning of Despicable Me 3, Clive The Robot spins his cassette tape around and puts it back in to play a different song.

He flips it incorrectly, though, and ends up putting it back in backward. Not only would this not make a sound because the tape wouldn’t be able to be read from that angle, but it also shouldn’t really have even been able to fit in the slot.

1 The Monarch Doesn’t Really Have That Sort Of Power

Considering Minions is a film about little yellow Minions who like to help out with evil schemes and talk in a made-up pseudo-Spanish language while the rest of the world turns a blind(ish) eye to their existence, there isn’t much point in picking out things that don’t make sense.

Well, not really. Minions introduces Queen Elizabeth II as a minor character, with a UK Monarch being shown to hold considerable political power. However, in reality, the British Monarch is more of a symbolic and ceremonial role, while political decisions (such as changing laws) is mostly down to the Prime Minister. As such, Bob wouldn’t have been able to abdicate and grant Scarlet the monarchy.