President Donald Trump urged his social media followers to check out Melania, Brett Ratner’s “must-see” documentary about his wife, against the recommendations of a long, long list of film critics.
Trump, 79, felt compelled to plug the $75 million production once more on Friday, after having done so on Monday while dubiously claiming that tickets were “selling out, fast.”
“Last night I saw, ‘MELANIA,’ for the second time,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, referring to the premiere at the Kennedy Center. “The audience loved it, and so do I. Check it out—'A MUST SEE!’"
The vast majority of early reviews by critics say otherwise.
The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon described Melania as an “abomination of filmmaking.”
Over the course of its 104 minutes, he wrote, “Melania has nothing to say, and is certainly not insightful. It is not juicy, nor entertaining.”
Elsewhere, critics took issue with the lack of tough questions posed to the film’s subject.
To Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman, Melania is “so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial.”
“To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies,” The Hollywood Reporter’s Frank Scheck wrote, criticizing it for its “onscreen graphics listing Melania’s achievements as first lady in such laudatory fashion that North Korea would blush.”
While the audience at the MAGA-fied venue in Washington, D.C. may have “loved” the film, as Trump said, in some theaters across the country, there hasn’t appeared to be much of an audience at all.
As of Thursday, the movie had sold out in just two of 1,400 theaters, according to a WIRED analysis of ticket seller Fandango, though it’s possible that theaters can use other sellers.
And in the days leading up to the documentary’s release, images of still-empty or nearly empty theaters made the rounds on social media.
