Idiocracy’ Predicted All of This

Heather MartinSeptember 1, 2026

Twenty years later, Mike Judge’s prescient comedy is getting harder to laugh at.

the movie, Luke Wilson gives a sweet and genuine performance as a literal average Joe frozen by the Army in an experiment. Through a series of mishaps, he and Rita (Maya Rudolph), a prostitute escaping jail by agreeing to be a guinea pig in the same test to keep people in suspended animation, are left forgotten in their pods longer than planned.

In the intervening five hundred years, the American populace gets objectively dumber through genetic drift, as intelligent professionals delay starting families and people who are, well, idiots go on to have babies by the dozen. Civilization devolves into chaos as commercial profits overtake the public interest, and the public’s interest is occupied by the pursuit of money, sex, and base entertainment. Corporations corrupt everything from health care to government—just ask Joe’s clueless internist, Dr. Lexus, or President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho.

When Joe and Rita awake, they are the smartest people on the planet. Unfortunately, that planet is dying. It’s dusty, it’s crumbling, and all of the crops are failing because a corporation has marketed its electrolyte beverage as the perfect irrigation fluid. “Brawndo,” crows every other flyer on America’s grimy streets, “It’s got what plants crave!”