Amazon has reportedly paid $35m (\u00a325m) to market the film which follows Melania Trump in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration on 20 January last year.<\/p>\n
It is also believed that Amazon paid around $40m for the rights to the film.<\/p>\n
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision to not go ahead with a theatrical release in territory,” Filmfinity’s Thobashan Govindarajulu is quoted as saying by the New York Times.<\/p>\n
He told News24 that the decision had been taken “given the current climate”.<\/p>\n
The executive did not elaborate on what was he meant by “recent developments” or “current climate”.<\/p>\n
Attempts by the BBC to get comment from Filmfinity, which describes itself as the leading film distributor in southern Africa, have so far been unsuccessful. <\/p>\n
But contacting the independent Labia cinema in Cape Town, the BBC was told that it was called by Filmfinity who said that the film would not be playing.<\/p>\n
Show times for Melania are not listed on the websites of South Africa’s two main cinema chains, Ster Kinekor and Nu Metro.<\/p>\n
Ster Kinekor’s publicity page for Melania, external<\/a> is not accessible.<\/p>\n Nu Metro trailed the film on its Instagram account, external<\/a> a fortnight ago. Its website’s Melania page still exists, external<\/a>, but does not list any show times – unlike the page for the drama Hamnet, which is also released in South Africa on Friday.<\/p>\n Since Donald Trump came to power a year ago, US relations with South Africa have slumped. <\/p>\n He has been promoting the widely discredited idea that there is a “white genocide” against South Africa’s Afrikaner community. Last May, Trump confronted South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa<\/a> over the issue in a tense White House meeting.<\/p>\n The president has also imposed high tariffs on South African goods and cut aid programmes.<\/p>\n His anger was also partly fuelled by Pretoria’s role in bringing a case against Israel to the International Court of Justice<\/a> (ICJ). The US ally has strongly rejected the allegation of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza as “baseless”.<\/p>\n