“Melania,” a documentary about First Woman Melania Trump, is exceeding field workplace expectations, with Sunday estimates suggesting it should make $7.04 million on its opening weekend.
The documentary is coming in third general for the weekend, behind the Sam Raimi-directed thriller “Ship Assist” ($20 million) and “Iron Lung” ($17.8 million), a online game adaptation from YouTuber Mark Fischbach (higher often known as Markiplier).
Amazon paid $40 million to amass “Melania” and is reportedly spending $35 million to put it on the market. So although the documentary is outperforming pre-release estimates predicting a $3 to $5 million opening weekend, it’s unlikely to make a revenue in theaters.
Amazon’s bid got here in $26 million forward of the subsequent highest bidder, Disney, main critics to recommend the deal had much less to do with the movie’s field workplace potential and extra with profitable over the Trump administration. Veteran movie government Ted Hope, who labored at Amazon from 2015 to 2020, instructed The New York Occasions that the movie “needs to be the costliest documentary ever made that didn’t contain music licensing.”
“How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe?” Hope stated. “How can that not be the case?”
That is the primary movie directed by Brett Ratner since 2017, when a number of girls accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct. (Ratner has denied these accusations.) Rolling Stone stories that two-thirds of the “Melania”‘s New York crew requested to not be formally credited within the movie.
Whereas Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner attended a preview screening of “Melania” on the White Home final weekend, “Melania” was not screened upfront for critics, and the following critiques have been brutal. The documentary at the moment sits at 7% on evaluation aggregator Metacritic, indicating “overwhelming dislike,” and at 10% on Rotten Tomatoes.
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June 23, 2026
New York Occasions movie critic Manohla Dargis described it as “a really circumscribed and thoroughly stage-managed chronicle of Mrs. Trump’s day-to-day life” throughout the 20 days earlier than President Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
In an announcement, Amazon MGM’s head of home theatrical distribution Kevin Wilson described this weekend as “an vital first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for each the movie and the forthcoming docu-series,” which he predicted may have a “important life” on Amazon’s Prime streaming service.