The ‘Melania’ Mirage: A $7M ‘Hit’ That Isn’t
The uncomfortable math behind Brett Ratner’s doc, minus the spin
With an opening weekend gross of $7 million, Brett Ratner’s critically reviled Melania scored the biggest opening for a documentary this decade — an outcome that sparked headlines about the Melania Trump movie beating “expectations” and social media chatter that the costly film is a “hit.”
Not so fast, says Sean McNulty, noting that the reported price tag for Jeff Bezos and Amazon to make and market the hagiography reached as high as $75 million.
“There’s a lot of positive spin on this. Jeff Bezos could have written a $50 million check to President Trump and just been done with it, if that’s the influence you think you’re buying here,” Sean says. “The lack of caveats here is a little bit troublesome.”
“It made $7 million, which sets all kinds of records because when you’re participating in a category that’s been dead for a few years, records come cheap,” says Richard Rushfield.
Despite the outsized chatter, Melania wasn’t the only new release to make noise this weekend. 20th Century Studios’ Send Help earned $20 million to top the charts, heralding a return of the thriller genre to theaters, while YouTuber Markiplier’s Iron Lung surprised in second place with $17 million (including 62 percent of ticket buyers under 25 years old).
“So it had become, over the last few years, kind of this piece of received wisdom that Gen Alpha and Gen Z don’t want to see movies anymore,” Richard says. “One after another, we’re just seeing things that aren’t traditional studio releases — be they anime things, Taylor Swift or whatever — finding success. Does 50 make a trend yet?”