“Melania,” a new documentary about the first lady’s return to the White House, took in $7 million in its domestic debut this past weekend — a strong showing for a documentary, but one nonetheless dwarfed by the film’s staggering production and marketing budget.
Is the film a financial success or a box office flop? It depends on who’s grading.
Amazon MGM reportedly spent $40 million to acquire and produce “Melania,” and a further $35 million to promote it. That marketing budget powered a splashy television ad campaign, with teasers airing during NFL games, and cable news segments on Fox News, CNN and MS NOW.
By some measures, the film’s $7 million haul was the best opening weekend for a documentary in a decade — though that claim is complicated since there is no universal definition of the genre. Concert films like “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which opened to $93 million in 2023, and stunt-driven fare like “Jackass Forever,” which debuted to $23 million in 2022, complicate the comparison.
Among political documentaries, only Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” opened higher. That 2004 film went on to become the highest-grossing documentary of all time in the United States.
Second to Moore is an enviable position for “Melania” to land in, but Scott Mendelson, who runs the box office newsletter The Outside Scoop, said that if it was any other film — and one produced by a studio not backed by a $2.6 trillion tech giant — the film would be a clear financial failure.
“By normal math, it’s a flop. But by streaming math, it’s a hit.” Mendelson said, referencing the documentary’s eventual placement on Amazon Prime Video, the streaming wing of Amazon MGM. “If this was a Fox movie, it was a Sony Movie, it would be a flop, nobody would be questioning it.”
The film’s enormous budget far exceeds typical spending on documentaries. Films with a similar scope and focused on a single subject over a period of time are typically budgeted around $5 million, the New York Times reported.
By contrast, “Melania” rivals the documentary budgets of Disney’s Earth Day hits “Nature” and “Oceans,” both of which were multi-year, globe-spanning productions.
Josh Davidsburg, a documentary filmmaker and senior lecturer at the University of Maryland, called Amazon’s spending “quite shocking.”
“It’s hard for documentaries to recoup their investments,” Davidsburg told MS NOW. “We don’t always expect to make our budgets back, so seeing Amazon put $75 million into this thing is quite shocking.”
Davidsburg said independent documentarians typically work with budgets between $100,000 and $600,000 — a fraction of what Amazon spent. Those funds have been getting harder to raise since the Trump administration gutted the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and partially defunded its ITVS service, which has offered financial backing for more than 1,400 film productions since 1989.
“It’s just hard to watch this discourse and the amount of money that [Amazon MGM] poured in while all of our other funding sources are drying up.” he said.
Amazon’s lavish promotional campaign included a premiere on Thursday at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, following a private White House screening on Jan. 24. Bezos attended the premiere, which was simulcast to 21 theaters nationwide. Melania Trump rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday.
The film was directed by Brett Ratner, known for the “Rush Hour” film trilogy, a favorite of President Trump’s. It is Ratner’s first project since he was effectively exiled from Hollywood in 2017, after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment and misconduct during the early days of the #MeToo movement. Ratner’s career rehabilitation is set to continue at President Trump’s request, after the president called for the David Ellison-owned Paramount Pictures to greenlight a fourth film in the “Rush Hour” series with Ratner directing. It would be his first narrative feature since 2014’s “Hercules.” Despite scathing reviews from critics — just 10 percent of the film’s reviews from professional film critics were positive on Rotten Tomatoes (which is owned by Versant, MS NOW’s parent company) — “Melania” succeeded in finding its core audience: 99 percent of audience members gave it a favorable review on the site, and Deadline reported that the film overindexed in areas like Texas, Florida, and cities with populations under half-a-million. “We’re very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response, with early box office for ‘Melania’ exceeding our expectations,” Kevin Wilson, head of domestic theatrical distribution for Amazon MGM, said. Roughly 72 percent of the film’s opening weekend audience was female, and 72 percent was over the age of 55, according to media analytics company Comscore. The majority of the moviegoers were white. Mendelson said the film’s opening benefitted from lowered expectations. “I think the pre-release punditry that suggested an opening between $3 and $5 million did little more than create an environment where a $7 million opening could be sold as an over performance,” Mendelson said. “Melania” is the latest documentary to find relative success among conservative audiences, following 2024’s “Am I Racist?,” which starred The Daily Wire’s right-wing provocateur Matt Walsh. But, unlike that film, which was reportedly made for roughly $3 million, “Melania” has virtually no path into the black while in theaters If it’s lucky, Mendelson said, it will crawl to the $20 million mark — far from profitability, but hardly a concern for Amazon’s balance sheet.
Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C. Recommended
