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It’s not often that a presidential administration faces a direct referendum at the box office. Sure, there was more than a hint of rebuke in Michael Moore’s 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 unexpectedly becoming the biggest-grossing non-music-or-nature documentary of all time (and highest full stop in North America) while taking re-election-year shots at George W Bush (who went on to squeak out another victory anyway). But that movie was also sold on Moore himself, a recent Oscar winner and fixture in both film and television by that point. Bush was excoriated, but he wasn’t exactly getting top billing. The unambiguous star of this weekend’s Trump-approved documentary is right there in the title: Melania. It’s coming to 1,500 theaters this weekend from Amazon/MGM.
Relatively few documentaries receive a wide release (though Melania is going out in about half as many theaters as last weekend’s Amazon release, the Chris Pratt vehicle Mercy), so comparison points are relatively few. Box office predictions generally place the movie well under Moore’s unlikely high-water mark for the form. Some are guessing the opening weekend will pull in about $1m, which would comfortably keep it off the list of the worst wide openings of all time (the record low for a new release in around 1,500 theaters is about $330,000) but would nonetheless qualify it as a bomb. Others estimate that it will go as high as $5m, putting it in line with rightwing docs like Am I Racist?, the highest-grossing documentary of 2024, which ended its run with $12m. As the Hollywood Reporter points out, technically inching ahead of Am I Racist? and the recent faith-based After Death would boast the biggest non-music launch for a documentary of the past decade.
But no one paid $40m to acquire Am I Racist? – or an additional $35m to market it. That’s how much Amazon has poured into Melania – remarkably, the most the deep-pocketed company has ever paid to secure distribution to a single film. This is seemingly the result of a post-election bidding war when corporate panic over matching a seeming rightward turn in the populace was at its peak.
Technically, paying the president-elect’s wife this much money – Melania reportedly pocketed nearly $30m of Amazon’s initial $40m outlay – was legal, because the first lady isn’t part of the government. She’s just a private citizen who happens to be married to the president and happened to receive a multimillion-dollar check from a company with many government contracts through its web services and other divisions. Healthy democratic stuff!
This has also led to the grim spectacle of a president taking time out from endorsing extrajudicial killing of private citizens to also plug a movie, which he claims is selling out theaters, and fast, ahead of its opening weekend. Amazon, only somewhat less hyperbolically, claims its willingness to invest $75m in a single doc (a format that has produced all of five movies that made at least $75m in North America; again, mostly music and nature, with that one Moore outlier) simply reflects perceived audience interest in a Melania documentary, not a desire to hastily curry favor with the current administration.
That hastiness means that Amazon also bought the project sight unseen – because when they ponied up the $40m, the movie, shot in the run-up to Trump’s second-term inauguration, didn’t really exist yet. But it did have a director, and technically one with a decent box office track record: to lend this project a veneer of real Hollywood glamour while still careful to endorse accused sex pests, Trump World recruited the disgraced film-maker Brett Ratner. He’s best-known for the Rush Hour trilogy; he also made an X-Men sequel and other big-name projects (including Tower Heist, initially conceived as a movie about robbing Trump Tower), before being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2017 (which he has denied). Melania is his first feature in 12 years. Ratner seemingly made up for lost time with a hurried, chaotic shoot employing three different camera crews to follow the once-and-future first lady around. According to Rolling Stone, this also left a literal “trail of detritus” in the wake of Ratner, cited by crew members as leaving orange peels and gum wrappers behind him (and bringing food into an area where crew had been denied meal breaks, devouring it in front of them).
Naturally, the film was withheld from critics – can you imagine explaining the concept of a free promotional or press screening to the Trump family? Maybe that’s why some advance sales – visible on the website for the AMC theater chain, among others – have been surprisingly decent-looking in blue-state strongholds like Manhattan, at least at some theaters; anyone who wants to review or write about the film directly will have to pay to get in.
At the AMC Lincoln Square, typically one of the highest-grossing theaters in the nation, the primary evening showing on Friday is on its way to selling out (or close to it), which would align it with theaters in deep-red Dallas. Meanwhile, a couple of miles south at the AMC Empire, the Times Square megaplex that routinely packs in audiences for titles big and small, the 7.15pm Friday-night Melania showing has sold nine tickets as of Wednesday morning. Three apparent superfans (or writers on deadline) have snapped up tickets to the very first showing of the day. (Not every movie makes most of its sales days ahead of time; then again, it’s hard to imagine a casual moviegoer turning up at a multiplex to see what’s playing and debating between, say, Rachel McAdams in Send Help, Chris Pratt in Mercy, or Melania Trump in Melania.) Anecdotally, Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported some booing of the Melania trailer disseminated on social media (and defacement of some print ads); I can confirm that at a recent commercial screening of Mercy, the ad for its Amazon stablemate did receive scattered boos in an Imax auditorium.
Obviously, Trump will declare Melania a smash success regardless of the result. (Advance online ticketing would also make it easy enough to goose sales, as has sometimes been the case with certain rightwing bestsellers.) For Melania herself, the box office is probably immaterial. She was already paid, and though Ratner has apparently continued to cozy up to the Trump family and film Melania, no one’s livelihood rests on the possibility of Melania II: The Quickening. The movie seemingly exists beyond its quick-grift payday as a shared delusion between Trump and his acolytes that he is, essentially, married to a glamorous and powerful movie star. Trump stans love to think of Melania as a return to “class” in the White House, a barely coded way of saying she’s a white woman with no discernible job or opinions apart from being pro-Melania. (Maybe the documentary will serve as an unboxing video for her having a thought about something not directly related to Trump.) But stardom can be punishingly difficult to maintain in this era, never mind buying it outright. Melania may not be the next big thing in cinemas, but she has figured out one major tenet of Hollywood: make sure someone else is footing the bill.
