Mike Judge continues to be underappreciated. For his next movie Extract, he’s gotten away from Fox, the studio which screwed him over twice and dumped his movies where no one could see them. Now he’s at Miramax, and it looks like they could be positioning themselves to do the same thing.
Extract has a release date, and it’s not a good one. According to Exhibitor Relations they’ve slated the movie for a September 4, 2009 release. That’s right, September, the month where movies go to die. The movie will debut in limited release and then expand the following weekend.
Mike Judge’s Extract now joins such abandoned, unwatched, and unpromoted early September fare as Bangkok Dangerous and Mike Judge’s last movie Idiocracy.
It’s not all bad. September, though generally regarded as a dumping ground for movies studios don’t really want to release, has spawned a few successful films. Burn After Reading came out in early September of last year and did pretty well. In 2007 3:10 to Yuma was released on September 7th and got a lot of buzz. It’s just hard not to worry if you’re a Judge fan. His last two movies, Idiocracy and Office Space, became huge cult hits, but only after being buried by the studio that funded them. It’s not really the release date which has killed his films, but the unwillingness of his distributors to promote or in the case of Idiocracy, even put them in movie theaters. Let’s hope Miramax isn’t planning to screw him over again. This isn’t a good sign.
