Office Space Mike Judge

Critical reception

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 81% based on 103 reviews and an average rating of 6.80/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Mike Judge lampoons the office grind with its inspired mix of sharp dialogue and witty one-liners."[19] Metacritic gives the film a weighted average score of 68 out of 100 based on reviews from 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[20] Audiences polled by CinemaScore during opening weekend gave the film an average grade of "C+" on a scale ranging from A+ to F.[21]

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and wrote that Judge: "Treats his characters a little like cartoon creatures. That works. Nuances of behavior are not necessary, because in the cubicle world every personality trait is magnified, and the captives stagger forth like grotesques."[22] In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Mick LaSalle writes, "Livingston is nicely cast as Peter, a young guy whose imagination and capacity for happiness are the very things making him miserable."[23] In USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna wrote, "If you've ever had a job, you'll be amused by this paean to peons."[24]

Owen Gleiberman in Entertainment Weekly gave the film a "C" rating and criticized it for feeling "cramped and underimagined".[25] In his review for The Globe and Mail, Rick Groen wrote: "Perhaps his TV background makes him unaccustomed to the demands of a feature-length script (the ending seems almost panicky in its abruptness), or maybe he just succumbs to the lure of the easy yuk...what began as discomfiting satire soon devolves into silly farce."[26] In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, "It has the loose-jointed feel of a bunch of sketches packed together into a narrative that doesn't gather much momentum."[27]

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly named Office Space one of "The 100 best films from 1983 to 2008", ranking it at #73.[28]

Cult status

Disappointed in the film's $12 million domestic gross, Judge decided to move on and began work on what eventually became Extract, a similarly themed followup to Office Space. Fox suggested that next time, he pay more heed to the studio's casting suggestions. However, he soon learned that the film had not gone unnoticed within the industry. "Jim Carrey invited me to his house. Chris Rock left me the best voicemail ever. I had dinner with Madonna", who found the Michael Bolton character's anger "sexy", Judge said.[11]

Four years later, Judge was working on the Idiocracy screenplay with Etan Cohen. During a break, the two went to an Austin Starbucks, and the baristas were doing impressions of Lumbergh. Cohen asked Judge if they were only doing it because he was present, whereupon the barista turned around and asked the two if they had ever seen the movie.[11]

Other cast members found the film had reached people when strangers began associating them with their characters. Cole said that a year after release, on the service jobs he works when not acting, people began shouting dialogue from the movie at him. Aniston says that even today, when she is eating "at a certain type of restaurant", people will ask if she likes their flair.

Comedy Central premiered Office Space on August 5, 2001; that airing drew 1.4 million viewers. By 2003, the channel had broadcast the film another 35 times.[29] These broadcasts helped develop the film's cult following; Livingston credits the regular airings the film received on the Comedy Central cable channel for making Office Space a cult favorite: "It felt like it kind of went viral before that concept even existed."[11]

Since then, Livingston has been approached by college students and office workers. He said, "I get a lot of people who say, 'I quit my job because of you.' That's kind of a heavy load to carry."[29] Livingston says that people tell him watching Office Space made them feel better, which he still appreciates.[11]

Legacy

Office Space has become a cult classic, selling well on home video and DVD.[6] As of 2003, it had sold 2.6 million copies on VHS and DVD.[30] In the same year, it was in the top 20 best-selling Fox DVDs.[29] As of 2006, it had sold over six million DVDs in the United States alone.[31]

Four years after the film's release, Judge recalled that one of his assistant directors on the film told him they had gone out to eat at a TGI Fridays and noticed that the waitstaff were no longer wearing buttons on their uniforms, the "flair" Joanna quits her job over in the film. Asked why, the manager told him that after Office Space had come out, customers started making jokes about it, so the chain dropped the requirement from its dress code. "So, maybe I made the world a better place" he told Deadline Hollywood in 2014.[32]

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly ranked it fifth on its list "25 Great Comedies From the Past 25 Years", despite having originally given the film a poor review.[33] In February 2009, a reunion of many of the cast members took place at the Paramount Theatre in Austin to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the film.[34][35] Rothman said in 2019 that despite his connection to several films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, he hopes Office Space will be mentioned before them in his obituary.[11]

"[Office Space] spoke to a generation in a way that few movies have," said John Altschuler, who produced Extract, Judge's later companion piece. "Nobody does this kind of material. It's all about the weirdness of real people in real life."[17]

In a 2017 profile of Judge, New York Times Magazine writer Willy Staley observed that the film has been compared to Herman Melville's short story "Bartleby, the Scrivener", in which a lawyer's clerk, like Peter, shows up at the office one day but declines all work, telling his boss "I would prefer not to". Staley's own high school English teacher, he recalled, brought up Office Space in class to get students to appreciate how tedious Franz Kafka's work at an insurance company was. "It's such a brutal portrayal of workplace misery that its most useful points of comparison date back to when office culture was first unleashed on humanity."[12]

The film was an influence on the creation of the television series Severance,[36] and the comic book series Chew, with the film's main characters cameoing in its third instalment, Just Desserts.[37]

In 2022 software engineer Ermenildo Valdez Castro was inspired by the movie Office Space, conducting a similar scheme from the movie by editing code to divert shipping fees to a personal account. A report from the Seattle police mentions that a folder named "OfficeSpace project" was found on Castro's work laptop and Castro admitted he was indeed inspired by the movie. Castro stole over $300,000 from the company Zulily. [38]

In 2024 at the South by Southwest conference, there was an Office Space Reunion panel with Judge, Livingston, Root, Naidu and Herman.[39]

In culture

Several elements of the film have become memes reused in other contexts. "TPS report" has come to connote pointless, mindless paperwork,[40] and an example of "literacy practices" in the work environment that are "meaningless exercises imposed upon employees by an inept and uncaring management" and "relentlessly mundane and enervating".[41] According to Judge, the abbreviation stood for "Test Program Set" in the movie.[34] The PC LOAD LETTER error message has likewise become a stand-in for any confusing, vague message from a computer, especially printers. The printer scene has been widely parodied, including by one U.S. presidential campaign, and the popularity of Milton's red stapler led the manufacturer to make a real one for sale.[11]

The film is credited with coining the now-popular slang term "ass clown", from one of the characters using it to refer to singer Michael Bolton.[42] In 2015, the comedy website Funny or Die put together several videos in which it spliced in the actual Michael Bolton over Herman in scenes from the film. Most of them were ones that referenced the confusion coming from the character and the singer having the same name. Bolton performed the scenes exactly as Herman had, with one exception: in his conversation with Samir, he turned to the camera and substituted the words "extremely talented" for "no-talent" before "ass-clown".[43]

Printer scene

Before the 2009 Austin reunion screening a printer was destroyed outside the theater, in reference to the scene in the film during which Peter, Michael, and Samir destroy the dysfunctional printer on the latter two's final day at Initech[44] That scene has frequently been parodied; often by amateurs, using a similar electronic device, in an open space somewhere, emulating the original's character blocking, camera angles and moves, sound effects and use of slow motion, all set to Geto Boys' "Still".[45]

The Fox animated series Family Guy did its own parody of the scene in 2008, during the show's seventh season. In "I Dream of Jesus", the season's second episode, Brian and Stewie Griffin, tired of Peter constantly playing The Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird", steal his 45 rpm single of the song and demolish it in a similar scene. For television a clean version of "Still" had to be used.[46]

During the campaign for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential election, Texas senator Ted Cruz ran a political advertisement parodying the scene, showing an impersonator of likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and two assistants destroying her personal email server with a baseball bat in an open field.[47][48]

Red stapler

Stephen Root says he realized the movie's impact when people started asking him to sign their staplers. The red Swingline stapler featured prominently in the film was not available until April 2002 when the company released it in response to repeated requests by fans of the film. Its appearance in the film was achieved by taking a standard Swingline stapler and spray-painting it red.[29] Root says when he shows up on sets today, the crew has usually ordered several boxes of red Swingline staplers and left them waiting for him.[11]