Are You Training Your Children to Accept the Occult?

Published: July 9, 2026

By Movieguide® Staff

Illumination’s MINIONS & MONSTERS hit theaters July 1 and failed a built-in audience of families who’ve turned the little yellow henchmen into a $5.6 billion empire. The Occult content pushed away families that could have continued the franchise’s success.

“I couldn’t believe how overt it was,” one parent wrote in a Reddit post that went viral after taking her kids to see the Minions “perform a ritual and summon a literal demon.” Then the box office numbers came in, and Hollywood got a real-time lesson in what families will and won’t put up with.

MINIONS & MONSTERS posted the lowest domestic opening of any DESPICABLE ME or MINIONS movie ever: $36.4 million over three days and $61.4 million over the five-day July 4th stretch, well under the $80 million Universal projected, according to Deadline. For a franchise that averages a movie every two years and has cleared a billion dollars twice, a franchise-low domestic debut is a signal worth reading.

Here’s what set parents off.

MINIONS & MONSTERS follows two Minions, James and Henry, who wind up in 1927 Hollywood trying to make it as filmmakers. Down on their luck, James dusts off a stolen spellbook from an evil sorcerer and, in a scene involving lit candles and a full incantation, conjures up a tiny monster named Goomi — who turns out to have a secret plan to help larger creatures eat everyone on Earth. The sequence draws openly from H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, complete with a Necronomicon-style grimoire.

Movieguide®’s own review flagged the same content. It’s a strange split-screen: a genuinely well-made movie, wrapped around a plot device that runs straight into what Scripture calls detestable.

Parents online weren’t shy about saying so.

“This is straight up satanic,” Tailah Scroggins said in a Facebook video, arguing the movie is “desensitizing our kids to witchcraft and the occult, just like so many other movies and TV shows out there.”

Another X user, Sabrina Ferrari, put it more bluntly still: “The film brings together invocations of demons, sexual perversion, and satanic symbols/seals. All of this in a movie made to corrupt your children from an early age.”

Related: MINIONS & MONSTERS

Not everyone agreed. One TikTok user summed up the pushback: “I’m a Christian and I still love watching stuff about witches and sorcery and dark rituals. Doesn’t mean me or my kids will paint a pentagram on the floor and start summoning demons.” Fair enough — fantasy isn’t automatically occultism, and Movieguide® has never argued that every dragon or wizard is a spiritual threat.

Dr. Ted Baehr, Movieguide®’s founder and publisher, mapped this exact tension years before MINIONS & MONSTERS existed.

In The Culture-Wise Family, the book Baehr co-wrote with Pat Boone, he uses the Harry Potter debate to describe the same split now playing out over the Minions: “One side cringed at the thought that millions of young children would be tempted to become witches and warlocks, while the other dismissed those concerns as an archaic inquisitorial attitude.”

Baehr and Boone’s answer borrows from C.S. Lewis, noting that people can make two mistakes about the devil — “taking him too seriously, or not taking him seriously enough.” They don’t let Christians off easy either: “We can understand why people whose worldviews are not rooted in the Bible would scoff at any concerns about witchcraft, as they do not know God’s teachings on this subject. However, for Christians to scoff at these concerns is a bit more troubling, for God clearly condemns witchcraft in His Word.”

That’s not a call to panic — it’s a call to pay attention. When HOCUS POCUS 2 hit similar notes back in 2022, Baehr walked through the biblical case even more plainly: Deuteronomy 18 lists sorcery and spell-casting among practices God calls detestable, Galatians 5 groups witchcraft with the acts of the sinful nature, and Revelation 21 puts “those who practice magic arts” in the same company as murderers and liars.

“All of these biblical passages — and more besides — show us, beyond all reasonable doubt, that God wants us to avoid completely witchcraft and sorcery,” Baehr wrote. The point isn’t that a cartoon spellbook will turn your kid into a warlock. It’s that treating witchcraft as a punchline trains the eye to stop flinching at it.

Movieguide® reported years ago that nearly three-quarters of American teenagers had experimented with witchcraft or psychic activity, with roughly half having tried witchcraft specifically — and that included 69% of teens who identified as born-again Christians. Baehr’s research into HARRY POTTER fan communities, detailed in his book FRODO & HARRY, found kids as young as 11 actually practicing spells they’d picked up from the books. Silly, cartoonish, or deadly serious, the pattern he’s tracked for decades is the same: what starts as entertainment has a way of becoming rehearsal.

This is the whole premise behind Baehr’s The Media-Wise Family, which has shaped Movieguide®’s approach since 1998.

The book doesn’t tell families to unplug the TV. It challenges them to actually look at what their kids are absorbing at each stage of development and to use real discernment instead of default settings — because, as Baehr likes to put it, “he who controls the media controls the culture.” That’s not a slogan. It’s the working theory behind a ministry that Ted and Lili Baehr started in Atlanta in 1985 and that now touches an estimated 64 million people a year with reviews, articles, and research most families never think to trace back to its source.

Movieguide® has always made the case with data, not just alarm. Its annual Report to the Entertainment Industry has documented for years that the highest-grossing movies tend to be the ones that reflect decent, hopeful, even overtly biblical values — a trend Hollywood keeps rediscovering the hard way. “It’s our prayer that, with each passing year, we’ll be able to report on increasing industry profits made on movies that uplift society, enrich people’s lives, and honor family, life and God,” Baehr has said of that work.

MINIONS & MONSTERS’ soft domestic landing is just the latest data point.

None of this means Christian families need to swear off Minions or fantasy stories generally.

Movieguide® has long distinguished between magic used as a literary device — the way Narnia or Middle-earth use it to tell a moral story — and magic presented as a real, working method for getting what you want, which is a very different thing to hand a seven-year-old. MINIONS & MONSTERS leans hard toward the second category, candles and incantation and all, even while it’s telling a genuinely sweet story about love saving the day.

We are what we watch. Not in some magical, superstitious sense, but in the very ordinary sense that repetition forms habits and habits form hearts. Scripture doesn’t ask Christians to analyze evil from a safe intellectual distance — it tells us to “abstain from every form of evil” (1 Thessalonians 5:22), silly or serious, cartoon or coven. Families skipping MINIONS & MONSTERS this summer, or at least talking it through with their kids afterward, aren’t being paranoid. They’re doing exactly what Baehr has spent forty years asking Christian parents to do: pay attention, ask questions, and choose the content that actually points toward truth.

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