Movies: Dude, Where's My Film?

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A desperate Fox last fall even considered shooting Idiocracy ads that wouldn't show any of the movie at all. But the big studio marketing departments don't work well with high-concept campaigns and grass-roots marketing. They're designed to blast radio and TV into the mass consciousness. Stranger still, they seem not to care that marketing a movie's theatrical distribution can boost its eventual DVD sales, which Idiocracy is very likely to score on. (After a modest theatrical run, Office Space went on to sell 6 million DVDs and videotapes.) That may be because DVD marketing comes out of the DVD division's budget, and why help those guys? They're over in a different building.

Not that anybody will talk about any of that--you'll notice there are no quotes in this story. That's because Fox doesn't want to bad-mouth Judge, not even off the record, and Judge doesn't want to complain about Fox. Judge knows he works in an Office Space world with dumb bosses who can't market an offbeat movie and an Idiocracy world where audiences react mainly to CGI bells and whistles. The best he can hope to do is quietly keep making fun of those facts, and hope it plays a lot on cable.