We’re now on the fourth mainline Despicable Me film (with a couple of Minions spinoffs out there too), and despite this being the case, the young children characters that were introduced in the first film haven’t seemed to age a day. This has been a conscious decision from Illumination and director of Despicable Me 4 Chris Renaud, but it may not always remain this way.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Renaud mentions that the idea of doing a Despicable Me film set 20 years in the future, with aged-up characters, isn’t out of the question or unreasonable.
“We have so many characters at this point in this world that, again, decisions have to be made. So aging them up in this particular film, then it becomes even more of an unanswered question as to what’s going on in their lives. But I don’t think that precludes us from doing something where we set a movie 20 years in the future and say, oh my gosh, Gru Jr. and Edith have now inherited dad’s villain business, or whatever. I think we can go anywhere we want.”
So, perhaps there is a day when Steve Carrell’s Gru hands over the reins of the franchise to his new fictional son, or some of the other adopted kids that he first encountered in 2010.