Pierre Coffin, the animator and director behind Illumination Entertainment's Minions, has signed with WME for representation in all areas, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. It's the first time in his career that Coffin has had formal representation, despite Academy Award and BAFTA nominations for his work as creator of the Minions and a driving force behind the Despicable Me franchise.
WME will continue supporting Coffin's work with Illumination while helping him branch out into live-action, hybrid and other projects beyond animation. The Despicable Me franchise has now crossed $6 billion at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing animated franchise in history.
Coffin, who is based in Paris, began his career as an animator, working at Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and the French studio Ex Machina. He made his feature directorial debut with 2010's Despicable Me, co-directing alongside Chris Renaud for Universal Pictures. That film, starring Steve Carell as the voice of reformed supervillain Gru — who reconsiders his life after adopting three girls — also introduced the Minions, characters Coffin himself voiced after devising their Minionese language.
He went on to co-direct the first two Despicable Me sequels as well as the 2015 spinoff Minions. His work on 2013's Despicable Me 2 earned him an Oscar nomination for best animated feature.
Following the release of Despicable Me 3 in 2017, Coffin told Illumination founder and CEO Chris Meledandri that he wanted to step away from the franchise he'd helped build. "I told him: I got to move on. I did my trilogy, my prequel — I'm good. I can help with the voices, no problem. But I want to move on," Coffin told the Associated Press earlier this year. "I worked on separate things, but I always get pulled back by the Minions."
That pull eventually led to his solo directorial debut this summer with Minions & Monsters, which grossed $523 million worldwide and stands as the best-reviewed entry in the franchise. The film's Old Hollywood setting, Coffin has said, reflects his own passion for cinema and classic filmmaking.
Photo: Reinhard Dietrich, CC BY-SA 3.0, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons
