‘Melania’ Exceeds Low Expectations as $75 Million Doc Scores $7 Million Opening

Melania: Twenty Days to History is proving the haters and losers wrong. The Brett Ratner-directed documentary chronicling three weeks in the life of the incoming first lady has over-performed expectations. The film is on track to bring in $7.04 million in ticket sales across 1,778 theaters in its opening weekend, according to Variety.

“BLOCKBUSTER!” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday morning, linking to a news post about the film’s performance.

Ahead of the film’s wide release on Friday, screenshots of theater seating charts filled with unsold seats proliferated across social media channels, and a Wired analysis found only two of 1,400 theaters had sold-out showings the day before the film debuted. 

The schadenfreude was premature: Melania handily beat forecasts predicting it would bring in somewhere between $1 million and $5 million in its opening weekend.

The film still has a long way to go before it is deemed profitable: while the production budget for Melania has not been disclosed, Amazon paid $40 million to license the film and an additional $35 million promoting it, making it one of the most expensive documentaries that has screened in theaters.

According to Variety, Amazon expects to recoup costs associated when the movie becomes available for streaming. “Lucrative licensing deals” the streamer secured are expected to further boost the movie’s bottom line.

Already, it is the most successful documentary Amazon MGM Studios has licensed: 2024’s The Blue Angels took in $1.4 million its opening weekend, though it screened in just 227 theaters, and I Am Celine Dion, which opened in just 480 theaters, took in only $283,358 its opening weekend in 2024.
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But box office validation mattered to the Trumps. As Melania Trump told Fox News last week, Brett Ratner’s past box office success was part of the rationale for bringing the disgraced director on board. “He was very talented. I know that, and box offices could tell you that, right — that he was very talented,” Trump said on Fox News. (Ratner’s previous directorial efforts brought in more than $2 billion in total.) 

Melania is the first movie the filmmaker has made since 2017, when he was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by six women. Crew members who worked on Melania told Rolling Stone that working with Ratner was the worst part of a “highly disorganized, very chaotic” production.