Mike Judge’s Idiocracy became a cult classic for arguing that we, as a whole, were heading towards mutual destruction in a future where the people with lower IQs would be the ones making major decisions that bring us to the point of no return. Many have found similarities between the movie and modern day life, including co-writer Etan Cohen.
Thanks to a rather contentious election season, Mike Judge teamed up with Terry Crews to bring Idiocracy‘s President Camacho back via a series of faux-ads used to mock the Donald Trump campaign. But, according to The Daily Beast, those videos will never see the light of day thanks to 20th Century FOX, who still technically own the rights to Idiocracy. Even though they essentially abandoned it at its release and were unhappy with everything about the videos. While there were talks between Judge and FOX, they fell through when it was announced that they were “anti-Trump.”
“It was announced that they were anti-Trump, and I would’ve preferred to make them and then have the people decide. Terry Crews had wanted to just make some funny Camacho ads, and Etan [Cohen] and I had written a few that I thought were pretty funny, and it just fell apart. I wanted to put them out a little more quietly and let them go viral, rather than people announcing we’re making anti-Trump ads. Just let them be funny first.”
Crews, who had previously reprised the role for a series of videos on Funny or Die, was upset with the videos being canceled, as well as there being an announcement about them prior to them even being signed off on. They wanted to simply release them without warning and let them go viral on their own. Judge sees FOX’s ownership of the film to be the biggest hurdle in doing anything else with the characters and seems resigned to not being able to make this series of videos. He’s also a bit disturbed by how things they joked about in the film seem to be closer and closer to reality, stuff like Donald Trump’s WWE run, Carl’s Jr.’s robo-ordering and so on.
“It’s surreal. I didn’t want Idiocracy to get popular by the world getting stupider faster. I guess I was 450 years off! But yeah, it’s a tad bit scary!”
If it’s actually too late for us remains to be seen, but things turn around in Idiocracy, not everything needs to be doom and gloom, right? …Right?!
(Via The Daily Beast/Slash/Film)
