{"id":443550,"date":"2026-02-01T21:57:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-01T21:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/443550\/"},"modified":"2026-02-01T21:57:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-01T21:57:09","slug":"amazons-melania-documentary-makes-7m-on-opening-weekend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/443550\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon\u2019s \u2018Melania\u2019 documentary makes $7M on opening weekend"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cMelania,\u201d a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, is exceeding box office expectations<\/a>, with Sunday estimates suggesting it will make $7.04 million on its opening weekend.<\/p>\n

The documentary is coming in third overall for the weekend, behind the Sam Raimi-directed thriller \u201cSend Help\u201d ($20 million) and \u201cIron Lung\u201d ($17.8 million), a video game adaptation from YouTuber Mark Fischbach (better known as Markiplier).<\/p>\n

Amazon paid $40 million to acquire \u201cMelania\u201d 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\u2019s unlikely to make a profit in theaters.<\/p>\n

Amazon\u2019s 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\u2019s 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<\/a> that the film \u201chas to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn\u2019t involve music licensing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHow can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?\u201d Hope said. \u201cHow can that not be the case?\u201d<\/p>\n

This is the first film directed by Brett Ratner since 2017, when multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct.<\/a> (Ratner has denied those accusations.) Rolling Stone reports that two-thirds of the \u201cMelania\u201d\u2018s New York crew asked not to be formally credited<\/a> in the film.<\/p>\n

While Apple CEO Tim Cook attended a preview screening of \u201cMelania\u201d<\/a> at the White House last weekend, \u201cMelania\u201d was not screened in advance for critics, and the subsequent reviews have been brutal. The documentary currently sits at 7% on review aggregator Metacritic<\/a>, indicating \u201coverwhelming dislike,\u201d and at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tBoston, MA
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJune 23, 2026\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis described it<\/a> as \u201ca very circumscribed and carefully stage-managed chronicle of Mrs. Trump\u2019s day-to-day life\u201d during the 20 days before President Trump\u2019s 2025 inauguration.<\/p>\n

In a statement, Amazon MGM\u2019s head of domestic theatrical distribution Kevin Wilson described this weekend as \u201can important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series,\u201d which he predicted will have a \u201csignificant life\u201d on Amazon\u2019s Prime streaming service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cMelania,\u201d a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, is exceeding box office expectations, with Sunday estimates suggesting it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":443551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[960,159529,88,163617,7182,206],"class_list":{"0":"post-443550","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-amazon","9":"tag-brett-ratner","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-melania","12":"tag-melania-trump","13":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=443550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/443551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=443550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=443550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=443550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}