Puzzling fate of a film satire

The biggest movie mystery of 2006 wasn’t whether audiences would forgive “Apocalypto” director Mel Gibson — they did — or whether Daniel Craig would make a good James Bond — he did.

It’s why a filmmaker with a successful track record had his latest film ignominiously dumped by the studio with which he’s worked for years.

Such is the puzzling fate of Mike Judge’s “Idiocracy.”

The former engineer started a national debate with his 1990s MTV series “Beavis and Butt-Head.” “King of the Hill” premiered on Fox 10 years ago and is still going strong — the 11th season of the animated comedy starts Jan. 21. He made his first live-action film in 1999; “Office Space” is a cult classic.

So why did Twentieth Century Fox sit on his futuristic comedy for two years before quietly releasing it Sept. 1 in just 125 theaters in seven cities — Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Austin and Toronto? One film chain owner told Cinematical.com that film festival programmers that asked to show “Idiocracy” were rebuffed by Fox. The studio didn’t release a single ad or poster promoting the film.

If you managed to hear about it, Moviefone couldn’t help you find showings. Steve Sailer, a film critic for the American Conservative magazine, points out that Fox didn’t tell Moviefone the film’s name, so it was called simply “Untitled Mike Judge Comedy” on the listings site.

“Idiocracy” finally gets a nationwide release this week with its appearance on DVD, but Fox is still making little effort to promote the film.

Fox didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Judge isn’t talking, either. So we may never know exactly why the film was spiked, although there are plenty of theories.

The most easily dismissed is that the film is a stinker. “Idiocracy” stars Luke Wilson (“Legally Blonde”) as Pvt. Joe Bowers. As the most average man in the Army, he’s recruited for an experiment that will have him in hibernation for a year. But the system breaks down, and he sleeps until 2505. America has become so dumbed-down that this average Joe is now the world’s smartest man. Alternately mocked for speaking so “faggy” — American English has devolved to a patois of hillbilly and inner-city — and begged to solve the nation’s problems, Joe just wants to get back home.

Variety heralded the film as “absolutely a satire for its time.” While its special effects look rather cheap, and its cast doesn’t seem to milk the script’s comic vision for all the laughs it might, “Idiocracy” is a pretty funny movie that pokes a sharp stick at America’s deepest cultural problems.

Harry Knowles, proprietor of the hot media Web site Ain’t It Cool News, calls it one of the best films Fox released last year. He points out that Fox released many films much worse than “Idiocracy,” such as “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” (the latter also starring Mr. Wilson).

But Time magazine’s Joel Stein echoes the Fox party line and argues that because “every ad and trailer the studio put together for it tested atrociously,” Fox simply couldn’t make a good advertisement for the film.

That theory becomes implausible when you consider that the film was made by a popular director, has a fairly marketable star and includes tons of gags tailor-made for a trailer.

Mr. Knowles has a more prosaic explanation. He lives in Austin, where Mr. Judge lives and where the movie was filmed, and has talked to people inside Fox and “Idiocracy.”

“From what I heard took place, director Mike Judge had some difficulties, personality-wise, with Tom Rothman,” Mr. Knowles reports. The chairman of Fox Filmed Entertainment, he says, “is a very gruff personality … . The top filmmakers that work with him are people like James Cameron and George Lucas, filmmakers who are basically using Fox as a distribution rather than a production company.” He says Peter Jackson took “Halo” elsewhere and Bryan Singer didn’t get to helm “X-Men III” because of his strong-arm style.

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