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Idiocracy is a 2006 American science fiction comedy film co-produced and directed by Mike Judge from a screenplay written by Judge and Etan Cohen based on a story written by Judge. The plot follows United States Army librarian Joe Bauers and prostitute Rita, who undergo a government hibernation experiment. Joe and Rita awake five hundred years later in a anti-intellectual society. The cast includes Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard, Terry Crews, David Herman, Justin Long, Andrew Wilson, and Brad Jordan.
The concept of Idiocracy dates back to a concept Judge envisioned in 1996. Judge finished a script with the working title 3001 in 2001, rewriting the film a year later. Filming took place throughout 2004 at Austin Studios and other cities in Texas. Idiocracy serves as a social satire that touches on issues including anti-intellectualism, commercialism, consumerism, dysgenics, voluntary childlessness, and overpopulation.
20th Century Fox was hesitant to promote the film, refusing to grant it a wide release, and did not screen the film for critics. The decision not to market Idiocracy was seen as unexpected, following the success of Office Space (1999), and led to speculation. According to Crews, the film's satirical depiction of corporations made the film financially unviable, while Judge attributed 20th Century Fox's decision to negative ; Judge stated that 20th Century Fox believed that the film would develop a cult film through its DVD release, similar to Office Space.
The film was released in the United States on September 1, 2006. Despite its lack of a major theatrical release, which resulted in a $495,000 gross at the box office, the film received positive reviews from critics and has since become a cult film.
Five hundred years later, a garbage avalanche disturbs Joe and Rita's hibernation chambers. Joe awakens in Frito Pendejo's apartment in previously-occupied Washington, D.C. Asking for help he is laughed at as homosexual by the residents who speak a mixture of "hillbilly, Valley Girl, inner-city slang, and various grunts." He enters a hospital, believing the army administered hallucinogenic drugs to him. Joe realizes the year upon reading a magazine and his hospital bill, but he is arrested at a Carl's Jr. for not having a bar code tattoo and being unable to pay his bill. Joe is sent to trial; Frito represents Joe but alleges he destroyed his apartment. The judge perceives Joe to have a homosexual demeanor, finding him guilty and sentencing him to prison. Rita resumes her job as a prostitute.
Joe is sent to a correctional facility, where a faulty identification machine registers his name as "Not Sure", and takes a simplified aptitude test. He escapes from prison after deceiving a guard by saying he had served his sentence and was scheduled for release. Joe visits Frito, who agrees to guide him to a time machine—located within a large Costco Wholesale store—after Joe promises to create a savings account in Frito's name when he returns to the 21st century, earning him billions in compound interest. With Rita, Joe and Frito enter the store, but Joe is arrested after his bar code is scanned. Joe is taken to the White House and appointed secretary of the interior by president Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho due to extraordinary performance on the aptitude test. In an address, Camacho states that Joe will resolve unfruitful crop yields, , and a stagnant economy, among other issues, within a week or face imprisonment.
Joe and Rita visit a crop field. Frito gives him a useless map to the time machine. Joe discovers that the country's crops are being watered with Brawndo, a sports drink whose parent company owns the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Federal Communications Commission; the concentration of in Brawndo has destroyed natural topsoil, causing dust storms. Despite opposition to his plan in the form of circular reasoning from the Cabinet, Joe convinces Camacho to use water instead of Brawndo in irrigation. Consequently, Brawndo—who employs half of the population—files for bankruptcy, inciting riots as immediate improvement to the crops did not materialize.
At the Extreme Court, Joe is sentenced to public execution in a monster truck demolition derby against undefeated rehabilitation officer Beef Supreme. Rita and Frito discover that Joe's reintroduction of water to the soil allowed crops to grow. Rita pays a cameraman to broadcast the crops on the stadium's Jumbotron, prompting Camacho to grant Joe a presidential pardon. After discovering the time machine is just an amusement ride, a detail Frito was aware of, Joe becomes president and marries Rita, with whom he has three children, who are "the three smartest kids in the world." Frito becomes vice president and has 32 children, "the dumbest kids ever to walk the earth". The narrator states that while Joe did not single-handedly save mankind, he did set in motion the chain of events that would eventually undo humanity's "dumbing-down".
The film was not screened for critics. Lack of concrete information from Fox led to speculation that the distributor may have actively tried to keep the film from being seen by a large audience, while fulfilling a contractual obligation for theatrical release ahead of a DVD release, according to Ryan Pearson of the Associated Press. That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, Time, and Esquire. Times Joel Stein wrote "the film's ads and trailers tested atrociously", but, "still, abandoning Idiocracy seems particularly unjust, since Judge has made a lot of money for Fox."
In The New York Times, Dan Mitchell argued that Fox might be shying away from the cautionary tale about low-intelligence dysgenics because the company did not want to offend either its viewers or potential advertisers portrayed negatively in the film. This theory has been given extra weight by Terry Crews, who stars in the movie as President Camacho. In a 2018 interview with GQ Magazine, he talked of advertisers being unhappy at the way they were portrayed, which affected the studio's efforts to promote the movie. He said, "The rumor was, because we used real corporations in our comedy (I mean, Starbucks was giving hand jobs) these companies gave us their name thinking they were gonna get 'pumped up', and then we're like, 'Welcome to Costco, we love you' delivered. All these real corporations were like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute' ... there were a lot of people trying to back out, but it was too late. And so Fox, who owned the movie, decided, 'We're going to release this in as few theaters as legally possible'. So it got a release in, probably, three theaters over one weekend and it was sucked out, into the vortex".
In 2017, Judge told The New York Times that the film's lack of marketing and wide release was the result of negative . He added that Fox subsequently decided to not give the film a strong marketing push because the distributor believed it would develop a cult film through word-of-mouth and recoup its budget through home video sales, as Judge's previous film Office Space had.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described it as "spot on" satire and a "pitch-black, bleakly hilarious vision of an American future", although the "plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight." In an Entertainment Weekly review, Joshua Rich gave the film an "EW Grade" of "D", stating that "Mike Judge implores us to reflect on a future in which Britney and K-Fed are like the new Adam and Eve." The A.V. Clubs Nathan Rabin found Luke Wilson "perfectly cast ... as a quintessential everyman"; and wrote of the film "Like so much superior science fiction, Idiocracy uses a fantastical future to comment on a present. ... There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing." Gerald Casale, a founding member of the new wave band Devo, said Idiocracy is "the movie Devo should have made." John Patterson, critic for The Guardian, wrote, " Idiocracy isn't a masterpiece—Fox seems to have stiffed Judge on money at every stage—but it's endlessly funny", and of the film's popularity, described seeing the film "in a half-empty house. Two days later, same place, same show—packed-out." Brazilian news magazine Veja called the film "politically incorrect", recommending that readers see the DVD and wrote "the film went flying through American theaters and did not open in Brazil. Proof that the future contemplated by Judge is not that far away."
Critic Alexandre Koball of the Brazilian website CinePlayers.com gave the movie a score of 5 out of 5. Another staff reviewer wrote, " Idiocracy is not exactly ... funny nor ... innovative but it's a movie to make you think, even if for five minutes. And for that it manages to stay one level above the terrible average of comedy movies released in the last years in the United States."
Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's first presidency. An article for Collider pointed out the ways in which Trump's positions echoed the political decisions of the characters in the film in areas such as science, business, entertainment, environment, healthcare, law enforcement, and politics. have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.
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