President Donald Trump appears desperate to make his wife’s movie Melania look like a success despite it coming nowhere close to recouping the money paid to the first lady and an outsized marketing campaign at the box office.
Trump shared a post on Truth Social that suggested the documentary did better than expected despite the cringeworthy reviews.
The president’s post from Forbes included the headline “’Melania’ Movie Blows Past Projections, Grossing $7 Million” with a line about how it was originally projected to rake in between $2 and $5 million at the box office, making it the “best opening for a documentary in the last decade.”
The president also shared an image of himself with the first lady from the movie’s Kennedy Center premiere last week.
But despite attempts by the president and his MAGA minions to make the documentary appear like a smash hit, the movie is still down roughly $68 million.
Melania’s earnings were a strong showing for a documentary, a genre that does not typically get repeatedly hyped by a president or promoted at theaters nationwide.
But the opening-weekend figure is a far cry from the $40 million Amazon spent on the film’s rights, which followed the first lady in the 20 days leading up to the inauguration.
It also spent an eye-popping $35 million on marketing and the film’s splashy release at more than 1,500 theaters, an exorbitant sum for a political documentary. The rollout included commemorative popcorn buckets and its trailer was projected on the Las Vegas Sphere.
Last weekend, the White House held a private screening of the movie before rolling out the black carpet for its world premiere at the Kennedy Center on Thursday.
The president has been shamelessly plugging his wife’s movie for his MAGA base on social media while the first lady, who has remained largely tucked away for much of Trump’s second term so far, showed up for a series of friendly interviews in the lead-up to her movie’s opening.
The outsized hype campaign was enough to put the movie in third place in the domestic top five over the weekend behind Send Help, which raked in $20 million in its opening weekend and Iron Lung, which brought in $17.9 million.
It also outperformed Zootopia 2, which in fourth place brought in $5.8 million, but the animated Disney sequel is in its ninth box office weekend.
Kevin Wilson, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of domestic theatrical distribution, was quick to spin the documentary’s opening weekend numbers as a strong start.
“This 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,” he said in a statement.
But film critics were quick to savage the movie in reviews as some accused Amazon of using Melania as a barely veiled massive bribe to the incoming president.
The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon described it as “a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review; it’s so expected and utterly pointless.”
Variety’s critic called the movie a “documentary that never comes to life” and wrote “it’s so orchestrated and airbrushed and stage-managed that it barely rises to the level of a shameless infomercial.”
The Hollywood Reporter described it as propaganda that “fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it.”
While the movie received just 10 percent from film critics on Rotten Tomatoes, it was well-received by the audience-focused rating system Popcornmeter, which had viewers rate it 99 percent over the weekend.
