{"id":451347,"date":"2026-02-05T22:47:07","date_gmt":"2026-02-05T22:47:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/451347\/"},"modified":"2026-02-05T22:47:07","modified_gmt":"2026-02-05T22:47:07","slug":"melania-trump-doc-reviews-are-historically-split-on-rotten-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/451347\/","title":{"rendered":"Melania Trump Doc Reviews Are Historically Split on Rotten Tomatoes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tCritics have not been kind to Melania<\/a>, the Amazon-funded documentary spotlighting First Lady Melania Trump<\/a>. The $75 million project has been uniformly panned as propaganda<\/a>, \u201ca preening, scowling void of pure nothingness<\/a>,\u201d \u201can obsequious, ring-kissing portrait of the current U.S. administration<\/a>,\u201d two hours of \u201cendless hell<\/a>,\u201d and at least a dozen other variations on absolutely god-awful.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut MAGA is refusing to let professionals have the last word on the matter. Apparently arriving at theaters in droves, Trump supporters and FLOTUS fans have fueled ticket sales in excess of $7 million<\/a>, helping Melania achieve the biggest opening for a documentary in the last decade. They have also taken to the review sites to heap boundless praise upon the first lady and her film. \u201cEvery red blooded American needs to see this movie to recognize the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic],\u201d wrote a verified first-time reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPositive audience reviews like that one have helped the Brett Ratner<\/a>-directed documentary break a new record: the biggest disparity between critical reception and audience sentiment in Rotten Tomatoes\u2019 history. A spokesperson for the review aggregator confirmed to Rolling Stone that Melania officially earned the dubious distinction on Wednesday evening. At press time, the film had a five percent score on the site\u2019s Tomatometer \u2014 which represents the percent of positive reviews from critics \u2014 and a 99 percent score on its Popcornmeter, representing positive reviews from movie goers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMelania, in fact, boasts the highest Popcornmeter rating for any film currently in theaters \u2014 surpassing the ratings of Oscars Best Picture nominees Hamnet and One Battle After Another, at 93 percent and 85 percent, respectively. (Melania\u2019s 99-percent score is among individuals who Rotten Tomatoes confirmed purchased tickets for the film; among unverified movie goers, the film has a significantly lower 29 percent score.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\tRotten Tomatoes insists that Melania\u2019s sky-high audience score is organic. \u201cThere has been NO manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary,\u201d a company spokesperson told Rolling Stone in a statement. \u201cReviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film through Fandango.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRotten Tomatoes declined to say which film previously held the record for biggest disparity between audience reviews and critics score, but several other films that catered to right-wing audiences have similarly yawning gaps. Dennis Quaid\u2019s 2024 presidential biopic Reagan<\/a> was savaged by critics, earning just 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes\u2019 Tomatometer while simultaneously notching 98 percent on the Popcornmeter. Critics\u2019 ratings of the Daily Wire mockumentary Am I Racist?<\/a>, released the same year, were 56 percent favorable, compared to 96 percent favorable reviews among ticket buyers. (The second largest disparity Rolling Stone could identify independently belonged to the Gold Rush-era romance Redeeming Love<\/a>, which currently has a 11 percent Tomatometer score and a 95 percent Popcornmeter score.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOver on IMDb, meanwhile, more than 44,000 ratings for Melania have been submitted, leading the website to plaster a notice of \u201cunusual activity\u201d at the top of the page. \u201cOur rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,\u201d the alert reads. More than 87 percent of the ratings have given the documentary one star, compared to the four percent of raters who believed it earned the full 10 stars.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI can\u2019t recall a theater filled with this much excitement and energy in a long time,\u201d said one 10-star reviewer on IMDb. \u201cAnd yes you can say it\u2019s the story of an immigrant family that is realizing the American dream, however beyond all that, the movie is entertaining. I recommend to go see it in the theater. The vibe is real.\u201d (That reviewer had rated only one other movie in their 10-year history of being on IMDb. \u201cBorn to Flop,\u201d is how they described last fall\u2019s Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere.)<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tIMDb did not return Rolling Stone\u2019s request for comment seeking an explanation on how it verifies users who submit ratings, or what prompted it to issue an alert over Melania\u2019s ratings surge.<\/p>\n

\n\tAmazon MGM Studios acquired the rights for the documentary, which chronicles 20 days in the life of the once and future first lady ahead of her husband\u2019s second inauguration, for $40 million just weeks after Donald Trump\u2019s election. That extraordinary figure, the highest price the streamer has ever paid for a piece of content, far exceeded the $14 million reportedly offered by Disney during a bidding war over the rights to the film, and was widely regarded as a thinly-veiled attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. (Jeff Bezos, who dined with the incoming president and first lady at Mar-a-Lago shortly before Amazon made its bid for the film, has extensive contracts with the federal government through both his cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, and his aerospace enterprise, Blue Origin.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tMelania is the first film director Brett Ratner has made since 2017, when he was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by six women. Production of the film itself, crew members told Rolling Stone<\/a>, was marred by chaos and disorganization, with many members of the production team asking for their names to be uncredited. \u201cI understand if a liberal is working on the movie, but they don\u2019t want to be credited but they want to feed their family. I don\u2019t blame anyone for that,\u201d Ratner said<\/a> when asked to respond to Rolling Stone\u2018s report at the film\u2019s Kennedy Center premiere.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tOn top of the licensing fee, Amazon reportedly spent an additional $35 million to promote the film, which debuted in more than 1,700 theaters nationwide on Friday, Jan. 30. Amazon insists that its investment was money well spent.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe\u2019re very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response,\u201d Kevin Wilson, head of domestic theatrical distribution at Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement released over the weekend. \u201cThis momentum is an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series, extending well beyond the theatrical window and into what we believe will be a significant run for both on our service.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Critics have not been kind to Melania, the Amazon-funded documentary spotlighting First Lady Melania Trump. The $75 million…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451348,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[159529,88,163617,7182,206,17108],"class_list":{"0":"post-451347","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-brett-ratner","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-melania","11":"tag-melania-trump","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-rotten-tomatoes"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451347","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=451347"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451347\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}