“Melania,” a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, is exceeding box office expectations, with Sunday estimates suggesting it will make $7.04 million on its opening weekend.
The documentary is coming in third overall for the weekend, behind the Sam Raimi-directed thriller “Send Help” ($20 million) and “Iron Lung” ($17.8 million), a video game adaptation from YouTuber Mark Fischbach (better known as Markiplier).
Amazon paid $40 million to acquire “Melania” and is reportedly spending $35 million to promote it. So even though the documentary is outperforming pre-release estimates predicting a $3 to $5 million opening weekend, it’s unlikely to make a profit in theaters.
Amazon’s bid came in $26 million ahead of the next highest bidder, Disney, leading critics to suggest the deal had less to do with the film’s box office potential and more with winning over the Trump administration. Veteran film executive Ted Hope, who worked at Amazon from 2015 to 2020, told The New York Times that the film “has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing.”
“How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?” Hope said. “How can that not be the case?”
This is the first film directed by Brett Ratner since 2017, when multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct. (Ratner has denied those accusations.) Rolling Stone reports that two-thirds of the “Melania” New York crew asked not to be formally credited in the film.
While Apple CEO Tim Cook attended a preview screening of “Melania” at the White House last weekend, “Melania” was not screened in advance for critics, and the subsequent reviews have been brutal. The documentary currently sits at 7% on review aggregator Metacritic, indicating “overwhelming dislike,” and at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described it as “a very circumscribed and carefully stage-managed chronicle of Mrs. Trump’s day-to-day life” during the 20 days before President Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
In a statement, Amazon MGM’s head of domestic theatrical distribution Kevin Wilson described this weekend as “an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series,” which he predicted will have a “significant life” on Amazon’s Prime streaming service.
