Is Mike Judge’s Idiocracy Getting A Spinoff?
There’s a very small, very prestigious club that you may not have heard about, but of which I am a proud member. It’s called the “People Who Actually Saw Idiocracy During the 90 Minutes Or So It Was In Theatrical Release” club. It’s a low-key kind of group. We don’t collect dues or have regular meetings or anything like that. Mainly we just nod knowingly at each other whenever somebody drops references to the thing that plants crave. But while Mike Judge’s razor-sharp satire has gone on to find a cult fanbase that was nowhere to be found in that big, empty theater back in 2006, it’s not the sort of movie you’d ever expect to get a sequel or a spinoff. According to Idiocracy actor Terry Crews, however, the very, very unlikely might be happening after all.
Crews played Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, five-time Ultimate Smackdown champion, acclaimed porn star, and President of the United States of America 500 years in the future when the population has devolved to a state of stupidity where they water their dying crops with an energy drink called Brawndo and one of the most popular TV shows is called “Ow, My Balls!” So yeah, not that different from now, really.
Camacho was one of the funniest parts of Idiocracy, and Crews tells Movieline that we may get a new serving of Mountain Dew (Herbert Camacho) soon. Crews says, “Me and Mike [Judge] are talking right now with Fox about some Camacho stuff … We literally met with Fox a week ago. It’s so cool.”
It doesn’t sound like the spinoff will be a new feature film, at least not at first. “We’re going to start off on the internet and do some small interstitials with Camacho,” explains Crews. So we’re likely talking about a web series of some sort, with more ambitious content possibly to follow if there proves to be sufficient interest. But let’s face it: even that is pretty astonishing considering the financial flop the original film made at the time.
Idiocracy is to this day an exercise in how not to promote a movie, having been treated by Fox the same way the Mafia treated Jimmy Hoffa (allegedly). Released unceremoniously in a mere seven theaters, you’d think the marketing campaign was designed by Hawley Griffin, ’cause I sure as hell couldn’t see any trace of it at the time. Unsurprisingly since most people didn’t even know it existed, it didn’t exactly set the box office on fire. We’re talking not even half a million dollars worldwide box office gross. And yeah, either definition of gross works in that sentence.
While Idiocracy is certainly not the only film in history to be given a raw deal, it does stand out as one of the most frustrating, because the movie is brilliant and hilarious. In a perfect world, it would have brought in Hangover money and Mike Judge would have been carried around Hollywood on a litter made of hundred-dollar bills. This is, needless to say, not a perfect world. But more Idiocracy, in whatever form that may be, would make it just a little bit closer to perfect, so I’ll take what we can get.
