Melania, Amazon\u2019s $106m (US$75m) documentary about the US first lady, has bombed at the Australian box office on its opening weekend, debuting at No 31 on the charts and taking just $982 (\u00a3503, US$688) per screen.<\/p>\n
The documentary, directed by Brett Ratner, was screened in 33 cinemas across Australia and made $32,399 overall.<\/p>\n
Melania placed 31st, one spot below Wicked: For Good, which has been in Australian cinemas for over two months but still made $33,231 from 35 screens over the weekend.<\/p>\n
Due to a worldwide embargo imposed by Amazon<\/a>, Melania opened in Australia on Friday, meaning its opening weekend figures, which are usually calculated from Thursday to Sunday, missed out on one day\u2019s takings.<\/p>\n However, opening weekend is generally the strongest for films without positive word of mouth to carry them along \u2013 and Melania has been widely lambasted as a blatant ploy by Amazon to curry favour with Donald Trump<\/a>, meaning it has already likely peaked in Australia.<\/p>\n By comparison internationally, Melania was screened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland and took \u00a332,974 (A$64,000) in its opening weekend<\/a>, for a screen average of \u00a3212.80 (A$415).<\/p>\n In the US it had the strongest start of any documentary in over a decade, taking US$7m<\/a> at the box office during its highly promoted opening weekend \u2013 but Melania cost significantly more than a typical documentary, at US$40m to make and US$35m to promote. In order to break even, the film will need to take around US$100m globally.<\/p>\n Donald Trump has told reporters he \u201cwasn\u2019t involved\u201d<\/a> in negotiations over the documentary\u2019s huge price tag, while Melania Trump has said the producers approached several distributors, but \u201cAmazon was the best because they agreed to do theatres all around the world\u201d.<\/p>\n Ratner \u2013 who had otherwise largely retreated from Hollywood after<\/a> numerous<\/a> sexual misconduct allegations<\/a> made during the #MeToo movement \u2013 has called the claims that his film was a favour for the Trumps \u201cridiculous\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cI can tell you right now, if we were audited and they said, \u2018How much was spent on this movie?\u2019 This movie is one of the most expensive movies \u2013 documentaries \u2013 in the genre ever made,\u201d he said at the Melania premiere. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t about getting rich. I mean, I think the Trumps are wealthy and successful enough. This is about giving me the ability to hire the best crew in the world, to not only score the film with the best composer \u2026 I mean, when you see the movie, you\u2019ll go, \u2018Oh, we see where the money went now.\u2019 This wasn\u2019t about corruption.\u201d<\/p>\n In his review, the Guardian critic Xan Brooks described the documentary as \u201cdispiriting, deadly and unrevealing\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a decent documentary to be made about the former model from Slovenia, but this one is unredeemable,\u201d he wrote.<\/a><\/p>\n The film is currently scoring 6%<\/a> on reviews aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and has six out of 100<\/a> on Metacritic. Meanwhile it has a rating of 1.3\/10<\/a> from more than 32,000 votes on the Internet Movie Database \u2013 an improvement on its earlier score of 1.0, which made it IMDb\u2019s lowest-rated movie of all time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melania, Amazon\u2019s $106m (US$75m) documentary about the US first lady, has bombed at the Australian box office on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-405178","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}