Idiocracy

Prologue: A glib case study demonstrates how ne'er-do-wells with lower IQ scores and incomes rashly reproduce at greater rates than more prudent, affluent, and overly logical intellectuals, thus reducing future humanity's average intelligence.

In 2005, US Army librarian, Joe Bauers, is tested as being the most statistically average individual in the armed forces and is assigned to a short term suspended animation experiment. Lacking a suitable female candidate, the military hires a prostitute, Rita, by dismissing charges against her and paying off her pimp, Upgrayedd. After Joe and Rita are placed in hibernation a sex scandal involving the experiment’s commanding officer and Upgrayedd causes the closure of the military base and the project is forgotten. Over the next five hundred years, average intelligence decreases. As a result, civilization and culture deteriorates towards Philistinism, low comedy, vulgarity, and unfettered consumerism.

Five hundred years later, a garbage avalanche disturbs Joe and Rita's hibernation chambers. Joe awakens in Frito Pendejo's apartment in previously occupied DC. Asking for help, he is laughed at 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 Carl's Jr. for not having a bar code tattoo and being unable to pay his bill. Joe is sent to trial; Frito represents him but alleges that he destroyed his apartment. The judge perceives Joe’s accent 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 ID 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 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. Rita, Joe, and Frito enter the store, but Joe is arrested after his bar code is scanned. He 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, dust storms, 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 FDA, the HHS, and the FCC; the concentration of electrolytes 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 stocks severely depreciate, leaving half the country's citizens unemployed and Brawndo filing 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 that the time machine is just an amusement ride, Joe becomes president and marries Rita, with whom he has "the three smartest kids in the world". Frito is appointed as the vice-president, and with eight wives, he ultimately begets "32 of the dumbest children to ever walk on Earth". The narrator states that while Joe did not single-handedly save mankind, he did set in motion the chain of events that eventually undid humanity's "dumbing-down".

In a post-credits scene, a third hibernation chamber opens to reveal Upgrayedd, who wakes up and walks off to search for Rita.

Left to right: Luke Wilson (pictured in 2016), Maya Rudolph (2012), and Dax Shepard (2013)

• Luke Wilson as Joe Bauers / Not Sure – a former librarian in the United States Army
• Maya Rudolph as Rita – A prostitute
• Dax Shepard as Frito Pendejo – a lawyer
• Terry Crews as Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho – the president of the United States
• Andrew Wilson as Beef Supreme – a rehabilitation officer
• Brad Jordan as Upgrayedd – a pimp

Other cast members include David Herman as the secretary of state, Justin Long as Doctor Lexus, Stephen Root as Judge Hector, Anthony "Citric" Campos as the Secretary of Defense, Thomas Haden Church as Brawndo's chief executive, and Sara Rue as the attorney general in an uncredited role.^[4][5]

Early working titles included The United States of Uhh-merica and 3001.^[6] Filming took place in 2004 on several stages at Austin Studios^[7][8] and in the Texas cities of Austin, San Marcos, Pflugerville, and Round Rock.^[9] In August 2005, Ain't It Cool News' Eric Vespe reported that he had attended a test screening, and reshoots had been conducted on the film to address the appearance of certain brand names in the film. Vespe expressed a positive reaction to the version of the film that he saw.^[10]

Idiocracy's original release date was August 5, 2005, according to Mike Judge.^[11] In April 2006, a release date was set for September 1, 2006. In August, numerous articles^[12] revealed that the release was to be put on hold indefinitely. Idiocracy was released as scheduled but only in seven cities (Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, and Mike Judge's hometown, Austin, Texas),^[8] and expanded to only 130 theaters,^[13] signficantly less than the usual wide release of 600 or more theaters.^[14] According to the Austin American-Statesman, 20th Century Fox, the film's distributor, did not promote the film.^[8] While posters were released to theaters, no movie trailers, ads,^[15] or press kits were released,^[16] and only two stills were released for press purposes.^[15]

The film was not screened for critics.^[17] 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.^[13] That speculation was followed by open criticism of the studio's lack of support from Ain't It Cool News, Time, and Esquire.^[18][19][20] Time's 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."^[19]

In The New York Times, Dan Mitchell argued that Fox may have been distancing itself from the film because it did not want to offend its viewers or potential advertisers portrayed negatively in the film.^[21] In a 2018 interview with GQ Magazine, Terry Crews, who plays President Camacho, gave credence to this theory, confirming that advertisers were indeed unhappy with how they were portrayed. Crews stated, "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 in monotone]. All these real corporations were like, 'Wait a minute, wait a minute...' A lot of people were 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".^[22]

In 2017, Judge told The New York Times that the film's lack of marketing and wide release was the result of negative test screenings.^[23] He added that Fox decided to not give the film a strong marketing push because the distributor believed it would develop a cult following through word-of-mouth and recoup its budget through home video sales, as Judge's previous film Office Space had.^[23]

Although it was not screened in advance for critics, Idiocracy received positive reviews.^[26]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 71% of 51 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Frustratingly uneven yet enjoyable overall, Idiocracy skewers society's devolution with an amiably goofy yet deceptively barbed wit."^[27]

Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[28]

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,^[29] 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. Club's 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."^[30] 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."

Idiocracy was released on DVD on January 9, 2007. It has earned $9 million from DVD rentals, over 20 times its domestic box-office gross of under $450,000.^[31] In the UK, uncut versions of the film were shown on satellite channel Sky Comedy on February 26, 2009, with the Freeview premiere shown on Film4 on April 26, 2009.

In August 2012, Crews said he was in talks with director Judge and Fox over a possible Idiocracy spin-off featuring his President Camacho character, initially conceived as a web series.^[32] A week before the 2012 elections, he reprised the character in a series of short sketches for Funny or Die. Before the 2016 presidential election, Rolling Stone published an article stating that Judge and Cohen would produce Idiocracy-themed campaign ads opposing Donald Trump's presidential campaign if given permission from Fox to do so.^[33] Crews later told Business Insider that the ads would not go forward as planned, but that they would have featured Camacho wrestling in a cage match against the other candidates.^[34]

During the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, the film's co-writer Etan Cohen^[35] and others expressed opinions that the film's predictions were converging on accuracy,^{[36][37][38][39]} a sentiment repeated by director Judge during the elections that year.^[40] At the time, Judge also compared Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump—who was later elected president—to the film's pro wrestler-turned-president Camacho.^[40] When asked about predicting the future, he quipped, "I'm no prophet, I was off by 490 years."^[41]

Comparisons have been made between the film and Trump's first presidency.^[42][43][44] 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.^[45] Internet memes have spawned comparisons to Trump and characters in the film.^[46][47][48]

The comparisons resurfaced when Trump became president again in 2025,^[49] and became referenced again in 2026.^[50] Idiocracy topped a New York Times poll of which films readers felt best captured the American experience, conducted for the United States Semiquincentennial.^[51]

• Dumbing down
• The Gene Bomb
• Kakistocracy
• The Marching Morons