Amazon’s Melania: Strong Box Office Start, Record Spending, and Political Undertones
The documentary Melania by Amazon MGM Studios delivered a stronger theatrical debut than even optimistic industry forecasts had anticipated. More than $7 million in its opening weekend in the United States is a result rarely achieved by non-fiction films without a music-driven hook or major festival pedigree. Pre-release estimates had placed the opening at $3–5 million, yet the actual numbers pushed the film to third place at the weekend box office, behind only two large-scale genre releases.
At first glance, this looks like a success. A closer look, however, shows that Melania is a case study in how a loud box office opening does not necessarily translate into commercial or reputational victory.
Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to the film, a figure that immediately raised eyebrows across Hollywood. According to media reports, the marketing campaign cost an additional roughly $35 million, bringing total spending close to $75 million. For a documentary without a global theatrical strategy, this level of investment is highly unusual. As a result, even outperforming opening forecasts does not change the core assessment: the film is unlikely to recoup its costs through theatrical exhibition alone. This imbalance between spending and realistic box office potential triggered sharp reactions within the industry. Former Amazon Studios executive Ted Hope publicly suggested that the deal looked less like a commercial bet and more like an attempt to cultivate political goodwill with the administration of Donald Trump. His remark describing the project as “the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing” quickly became shorthand for the skepticism surrounding the deal. The political subtext only intensifies the discussion. Melania arrived at a moment when Donald Trump is preparing for another presidential term, while the film itself focuses on 20 days in the life of Melania Trump ahead of the 2025 inauguration. Critics were not shown the film prior to release, a move that in Hollywood is often read as a sign of limited confidence in a project’s reception. When reviews did appear, they were harsh: 7% on Metacritic and around 10% on Rotten Tomatoes, placing the film among the lowest-rated documentaries of comparable scale in recent years.
Critics did not frame the reaction as a technical failure, but rather as a problem of narrow scope and tight control over the narrative. The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “a very circumscribed and carefully stage-managed chronicle of Mrs. Trump’s day-to-day life,” emphasizing that it feels more like a constructed portrait than an attempt to examine the broader role of a first lady in contemporary American politics.
Another layer of controversy is tied to the director. Melania marks the first feature directed by Brett Ratner since 2017, when several women accused him of sexual harassment. Ratner has denied the allegations, but his return to a high-profile project immediately drew scrutiny. According to Rolling Stone, around two-thirds of the New York-based crew requested that their names not appear in the film’s credits, an unusual decision for a documentary with political overtones.
Despite this, Amazon insists that theatrical release is only the opening phase. Amazon MGM Studios says it expects a “long-tail lifecycle” for the film, followed by a documentary series on Amazon Prime Video, which executives view as the primary venue for monetization and justification of the investment. In the end, Melania stands as a revealing case for the modern media landscape. It is not merely a documentary about the first lady of the United States, but a collision of cinema, politics, corporate strategy, and public reputation. The strong opening weekend demonstrates audience curiosity, yet the critical response and questionable economics raise a more pointed question: what exactly was Amazon buying for tens of millions of dollars a film, influence, or access? The answer appears to extend well beyond cinema. That is why Melania already reads less like a documentary portrait and more like a marker of how major corporations engage with political symbolism in today’s media ecosystem.
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