Melania Trump's documentaryMelania: Twenty Days to Historyopened on 1,500 screens across the US in late January and, two weeks later, had taken $13.5 million domestically, leaving Amazon MGM, director Brett Ratner and the First Lady confronting the question hanging over the release.
For all the attention around the film, the issue now is whether a reported $75 million spend was reckless in old fashioned box office terms or shrewd in a business that no longer lives by ticket sales alone.
Amazon MGM reportedly paid $40 million for distribution rights and a companion docuseries, then committed another $35 million to marketing a nonfiction film about Melania Trump's return to Washington. That sort of outlay is unusual for a documentary, which is why the early expectation of a $1 million to $5 million opening weekend always felt like the real pressure point rather than a curiosity for film obsessives.
The film was projected to finish its theatrical run somewhere between $16 million and $20 million, which would make it one of the better performing political documentaries of recent years, but still nowhere near enough to cover the money reportedly spent getting it into the market.
Even ifMelanialands at the top end of those projections, theatre owners keep roughly half of ticket sales, meaning Amazon could end up with only about $10 million back from cinemas. By that measure, the theatrical release looks less like a triumph than a very expensive exercise in visibility.
And yet the picture is not quite so neat. Compared with 2018'sRBG, which finished on $14.4 million, andWon't You Be My Neighbor, which grossed $22 million,Melaniais not operating in outright flop territory. It is occupying a more slippery category, commercially vulnerable on paper but not exactly invisible in the marketplace either.
Where the film gets more interesting is in the gap between what critics made of it and what audiences appeared to think they were getting. The documentary earned an 'A' CinemaScore and a 99 per cent audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, set against an 10 per cent critics' score. That kind of split does not settle the argument, but it does suggest the film is doing two jobs at once and satisfying only one side of the room.
🚨BREAKING: YouTube’s biggest creator,@MrBeast, just slammed Rotten Tomatoes for allowing critic movie scores to be EASILY RIGGED.This is what’s happened to First Lady Melania Trump’s movie, which currently has a 99% AUDIENCE SCORE & a 10% critic score.Follow:@BoLoudonpic.twitter.com/4Brd7kFy1Y
Melania Trump herself seemed keen to push the film away from any narrow documentary label at its Washington premiere. 'Some have called this a documentary. It is not. It is a creative experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments,' she said. Asked what success looked like, she answered, 'For myself, it's already successful, what we did. And it will speak for itself.'
🚨 JUST IN: New film “Melania” earns 99% audience approval while critics give it just 11%, the exact opposite of Fauci, which scores high with experts but flops with viewers.pic.twitter.com/3cy2Xnqi6P
Source: International Business Times UK
