Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, "The year 2013 has been an amazing one for movies, though maybe every year is an amazing year for movies if one is ready to be amazed by movies. It's also a particularly apt year to make a list of the best films. Making a list is not merely a numerical act but also a polemical one, and the best of this year's films are polemical in their assertion of the singularity of cinema, as well as of the art form's opposition to the disposable images of television. The 2013 crop comprises an unplanned, if not accidental, collective declaration of the essence of the cinema, an art of images and sounds that, at their best, don't exist to tell a story or to tantalize the audience (though they may well do so) but, rather, to reflect a crisis in the life of the filmmaker and the state of the artist's mind or, even, soul." He also stated, "The best movies this year are films of combative cinema, audacious inventions in vision. The specificity and originality of their moment-to-moment creation of images offers new ways for viewers to confront the notion of what "narrative" might be. Their revitalization of storytelling as experience restores to the cinema its primordial mode of redefining consciousness. It's significant that some of the filmmakers in the forefront of that charge are from the generation of the elders, innovators of the seventies. In the age of radical cinema sparked by digital technology, the rise of independent producers, and the ready ubiquity of the history of cinema (thanks to DVDs and streaming video), these older directors have experienced a glorious second youth. That artistic rejuvenation is also due to the stimulating ambiance of actual youth—a young generation of freethinking cinephiles, critics, and filmmakers who, thanks to the Internet, make their appreciation of these sublime extremes widely and quickly known, even when the mainstream of viewers and reviewers miss out."[1]
Despicable Me 2 became the highest-grossing non-Disney animated film worldwide, surpassing the 9-year record of Shrek 2 (2004). However it was surpassed by Minions in 2015. It also became the highest-grossing film ever distributed by Universal in its initial release, surpassing the initial gross of Jurassic Park (1993), which grossed $912 million in its initial release 20 years earlier.