Amazon Pulls Melania Trump Documentary From Oregon Theater After Marquee Jab, as Film’s Costly Rollout Sparks Political Fight

On a rain-soaked afternoon in Lake Oswego, Oregon, staff at the Lake Theater & Cafe climbed a ladder to change their marquee. Days earlier, the independent cinema had advertised Brett Ratner’s new documentary Melania with a winking line — “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. MELANIA.” The quip quickly spread on social media.

Then Amazon MGM Studios, which is distributing the film, pulled it from the theater’s schedule.

“They told us they didn’t appreciate the commentary on the marquee and that the film would be removed,” Jordan Perry, the theater’s general manager, said in an interview. By the time the studio cut ties, the run had produced just $196 in ticket revenue for Amazon, he said.

That small dispute at a single-screen arthouse is one of several flashpoints in the politically charged rollout of Melania, a feature-length portrait of First Lady Melania Trump that has become a proxy battle over power, propaganda and the meaning of box-office success.

The film, which opened nationwide Jan. 30, has been loudly embraced by Trump supporters, sharply panned by most critics and closely watched by political operatives and tech-policy analysts. Its release has raised questions about a record-setting entertainment deal between a sitting First Lady and one of the world’s most powerful technology companies, even as audiences turned to a four-year-old Netflix documentary about Michelle Obama in apparent protest.

A record deal for a controlled portrait

Melania chronicles roughly 20 days in early 2025, as Trump prepares to return to the White House for a second term as the 47th president. Cameras follow the First Lady through wardrobe fittings, inauguration planning sessions, travel on Air Force One and meetings with foreign dignitaries.

The documentary marks Ratner’s first major directorial effort since 2017, when a series of women accused him of sexual harassment and assault in a Los Angeles Times investigation. Ratner denied the allegations, but his production deals with major studios lapsed and he largely disappeared from studio directing.

Amazon MGM Studios acquired Melania in a licensing and production agreement reported to be worth about $40 million, with an additional global marketing campaign estimated at around $35 million. Industry analysts say those figures place the project among the most expensive documentaries ever produced, rivaling or surpassing sums usually reserved for major narrative films.

Melania Trump is credited as a producer and executive producer and was deeply involved in shaping the film and its promotion. Her adviser Marc Beckman told CNN before the release that Trump personally helped construct the trailer, chose the music and oversaw visual elements of the ad campaign.

“She built that trailer,” Beckman said. “She created the cliffhanger, she selected the music.”

News reports citing people familiar with the deal have said Trump stands to receive roughly 70% of the licensing fee, amounting to an estimated $27 million to $28 million.

At the Kennedy Center premiere in Washington on Jan. 29, Trump framed the film as an attempt to show the strain and scrutiny of returning to the White House.

“I want to show the audience my life, what it takes to be a first lady again and the transition from private citizen back to the White House,” she told reporters on the black carpet.

White House gala and red-zone rollout

The premiere followed a private White House screening the previous weekend that doubled as a high-profile networking event. About 70 invited guests — including Apple chief executive Tim Cook, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy, Amazon streaming head Mike Hopkins, Queen Rania of Jordan and several business leaders — attended the showing and a formal dinner, according to people who were present.

From there, Amazon launched an unusually aggressive marketing campaign for a nonfiction film. Television spots ran heavily on Fox News programs such as The Five and Fox & Friends, as well as on NFL broadcasts and other cable networks. Outdoor and transit advertising appeared in major cities, and promotional imagery for the film ran on the giant Sphere screen in Las Vegas.

Former President Donald Trump amplified the project on his social media platform, calling it “a MUST WATCH” and urging supporters to buy tickets.

The film opened in about 1,500 theaters across the United States and roughly 5,000 venues worldwide. A theatrical run was a contractual requirement of Amazon’s deal, people familiar with the agreement said.

Strong opening, starkly divided response

By the end of its opening weekend, Melania had taken in about $7 million to $7.1 million in ticket sales in the United States and Canada, placing third at the domestic box office. Trade publications noted that it was one of the strongest openings for a non-concert documentary in more than a decade.

Audience data collected by firms that specialize in exit polling and admissions showed an unusually concentrated crowd profile. About 72% of ticket buyers were women, and roughly the same share were 55 or older. Nearly half of respondents identified as Republican, while only a small fraction said they were Democrats.

The movie performed best in so-called “red-zone” markets such as Dallas–Fort Worth, Tampa, Orlando, Phoenix and parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast, and underperformed in coastal metropolitan areas like New York and Los Angeles.

Viewers who did attend generally rated the film highly. CinemaScore, which surveys audiences on opening night, awarded Melania an A grade, a mark typically associated with strong word of mouth.

Critics were far less impressed. On review aggregation sites, the documentary quickly settled into the single digits on a 100-point scale. Reviewers for major outlets described the film as a carefully managed branding exercise that avoided controversial topics — including the first Trump administration’s handling of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the former president’s criminal cases and persistent questions about Melania Trump’s role in policymaking.

The Guardian called the project “expensive propaganda” and said it offered “no real insight” into its subject. Time magazine described it as “a glossy, tightly controlled narrative that keeps anything messy or unscripted off-camera.”

Complicating the picture, public rating platforms split dramatically. On Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score for Melania — which is limited to users who verify a ticket purchase — hovered near 99% in the days after release. On IMDb, where users can rate any title, the film’s score dropped to around 1.3 out of 10, placing it among the lowest-rated movies in the site’s history. The disparity fueled accusations of coordinated “review bombing” from both backers and opponents.

Empty theaters and claims of fake tickets

Alongside the official box-office figures, images of mostly empty auditoriums circulated widely online. In some blue-leaning cities, moviegoers and local reporters documented screenings with only a handful of people in attendance. One multiplex in Boston reported selling a single ticket across three showtimes on a weekday, according to local coverage.

Those anecdotes, combined with the partisan marketing and heavy promotion on conservative media, led some commentators and rival campaigns to question whether the opening-weekend numbers reflected actual demand. The Guardian and other outlets cited unnamed industry sources who speculated that the totals might have been bolstered by bulk ticket purchases, free allocations to churches and senior centers, or “four-walling” arrangements in which a distributor effectively rents its own screens.

Amazon MGM and major theater chains have denied any irregularities.

“We have not seen evidence of unusual bulk buying beyond what we’d expect from group sales,” a spokesperson for AMC Theatres said. A representative for Amazon MGM said ticket sales were consistent with other politically oriented and faith-based documentaries that draw concentrated audiences but generate relatively high per-screen averages.

EntTelligence, a firm that tracks theater admissions using independent data, reported that roughly 600,000 tickets were sold for Melania over the opening weekend, with attendance patterns that closely tracked Republican-leaning counties.

The lack of publicly accessible ticket-source data has left the competing narratives unresolved: critics point to sparse crowds in liberal cities as evidence of inflated demand, while supporters argue that coastal skepticism ignores strong turnout in conservative regions.

A spike for Becoming

As Melania rolled out in theaters, another film about a First Lady surged back into the cultural conversation.

Netflix’s Becoming, a 2020 documentary following Michelle Obama on a book tour after leaving the White House, recorded roughly 47.5 million minutes viewed in the United States over the same Jan. 30–Feb. 1 weekend, according to figures from measurement firm Luminate reported by entertainment outlets. A week earlier, the film had logged about 354,000 minutes, representing an increase of more than 13,000%.

The documentary reappeared in Netflix’s internal Top 10 charts. On social media, users promoted hashtags encouraging people to “stream Becoming instead” of going to see Melania, framing the act of watching the older film as a show of political or cultural preference.

Neither Netflix nor Michelle Obama publicly linked the spike to the new release. But the unusual surge for a four-year-old title underscored how streaming choices are increasingly interpreted as signals in the broader political landscape.

Amazon’s Washington calculus

The scale and timing of the Melania deal have also drawn attention from policy experts who track the relationship between large technology platforms and the federal government.

Amazon, which completed its purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 2022, now operates a major studio and the Prime Video streaming platform while also managing a vast e-commerce business and a dominant cloud-computing division. The company faces scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice over competition and labor issues, and relies on federal, state and local governments as major customers.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and executive chairman, also owns The Washington Post, a newspaper that clashed repeatedly with Donald Trump during his first term. Trump has accused Amazon of unfair practices related to taxes and postal rates and has frequently criticized Bezos personally.

Against that backdrop, some legal scholars and ethics advocates have questioned whether paying tens of millions of dollars to a company controlled by the First Lady creates at least the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Amazon has declined to address that criticism directly, saying in statements that it views Melania as part of a broader effort to invest in nonfiction storytelling and believes the film will draw sustained interest on Prime Video and in international markets.

International box-office numbers so far have been modest. In the United Kingdom and Ireland, Melania opened at No. 29, with a per-screen average of only a few hundred pounds despite playing in about 100 theaters. The film posted similarly small figures in Australia, and its release in South Africa was canceled by a local distributor shortly before opening.

A contested place in the nonfiction landscape

For now, Melania occupies a peculiar position: a documentary with a blockbuster-scale deal but a polarized, geographically concentrated audience; a film dismissed as propaganda by many critics but defended as overdue recognition by supporters; a box-office performer whose success is debated nearly as much as its content.

Back in Lake Oswego, the marquee at the Lake Theater & Cafe has moved on to other titles. After Amazon pulled the documentary, the theater briefly replaced its message with a new jab — this time at the tech giant itself, referencing its grocery chain and delivery service — before returning to standard listings.

Perry, the manager, said the theater drew complaints both for showing the film and for mocking it.

“We were getting it from both sides,” he said. “Some people were upset that we were playing it at all. Others were upset we were making fun of it. That probably tells you everything you need to know about where the country is right now.”

As Melania heads into its second week in theaters and inevitable streaming release on Prime Video, the film’s afterlife may depend less on its box office than on what it represents: a test of how far political figures can monetize access to their image, and how willing global platforms are to help them shape the historical record.