Megamind (2010) Rewatched: the Villain-Protagonist Comedy That Flopped Into Cult Status
The site's original review ran in November 2010, when Megamind opened against a rival villain comedy (Despicable Me) and lost the box office so thoroughly that the rewatch series had to ask why. Rewatching it in 2026, the answer has flipped the way cult films always flip: Megamind is the more structurally ambitious of the two, and the years have given it the audience that missed it.
The deconstruction hiding in the setup
The film's premise sounds like a gag: a supervillain wins for once, conquers the city, and discovers victory is empty. The rewatch takes the premise seriously — Megamind is a portrait of identity built entirely on opposition. He has no self except "the guy who fights Metro Man"; his entire arc is the crisis of a persona losing its counterpart. When he creates a new hero (Titan) to restore his purpose and the creation goes wrong, the film is running a real argument about what makes a villain: choice or narrative. For a movie with a fart-joke-adjacent alien fish sidekick, that is unusually load-bearing philosophy.
Will Ferrell, restrained by design
The rewatch credits Ferrell's vocal performance as the film's engine: Megamind's grandiosity is played as loneliness — the dramatic alien-monologue voice cracking into genuine hurt in the scenes with Roxanne. Fey's Roxanne Riordan is the film's grounding: a reporter who treats the villain-hero war as a beat to cover, until she becomes its conscience. And the Metro Man reveal (the hero who wants to retire to music) re-ranks the whole film on second viewing: the "good" and "evil" of the setup were both performances, and the rewatch catches every seam.
The visual ambition, overlooked in 2010
The rewatch also restores credit to the look: Megamind's metropolis plays with art-deco-meets-expressionist villain architecture, the invisible-car sequences, the skin-tight black-suited disguise gag that works because of Fey's reaction shots. The action staging — the skyline battle, the holographic decoy, the climax in the observatory — is more inventive than its box-office competitor's, and the animation holds up cleanly.
Why it lost, and why it won
The rewatch's verdict on the 2010 defeat: Megamind asked its audience to empathize with the villain's existential crisis; Despicable Me asked them to enjoy a villain being softened by three little girls. The second pitch is easier to sell in a trailer. Fifteen years later, the first pitch has aged into the more interesting film — and the internet's reassessment of Megamind as the underrated one is simply the audience catching up.
The archive angle
The site's November 2010 review is preserved in the archive as filed, from the same autumn as our Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Tangled rewatches — the stretch where franchise animation and franchise fantasy were both reinventing their formulas. Read the original, rewatch Megamind, and count how many of its ideas the superhero genre spent the next decade borrowing.