Dana Stevens has an interesting piece up today on Slate about Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, just out recently on DVD, in comparison to Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men. The gist of the piece is that it’s slightly unnerving that two of the year’s more underappreciated and snuffed films — certainly from a marketing perspective — also happen to be the two that probably ask
us to peer most deeply into the mirror and contemplate our shared future and its correlation to the way we interact with one another and comport ourselves culturally and socially.

It’s an interesting thesis, and there’s probably something there. While I think Universal’s marketing of Children of Men falls more into the category of simply not knowing what they had, I previously speculated about the reasoning of Fox’s bizarre dumping of Idiocracy here. The maintenance of the well-groomed hedges of other financially beneficial relationships, I believe, won out.