‘Melania’ Doc Gets Questionable Hype from President Trump’s Wife

The First Lady, Melania Trump, is blocking out the critical noise to celebrate a few cheap victories on social media. It’s all to do with the 55-year-old’s new feature-length Prime Video documentary, simply titled Melania, which boasts Brett Ratner (Rush Hour) in the director’s chair and chronicles the 20 days leading up to her controversial husband Donald Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January 2025. Despite welcoming an embarrassing 11% score on the Rotten Tomatometer (at the time of writing), the dismissive Mrs. Trump wrote on X: “MELANIA, the film. #1 Highest Opening In 10 Yrs (Doc) Loved By All – “A” CinemaScore.”

She’s not incorrect, by the way. In its first 24 hours of theatrical release, Melania brought in almost $3 million’s worth of box office receipts. But for the documentary to truly justify its international rollout on the big screen, it must at least break even with the $40m budget. In response to her bragging on social media, one person wrote: “This is the weirdest distraction yet from the Epstein files and that’s saying something.” A second X user called her a “comedienne extraordinaire.”

While the First Lady is true in her statement about the new projection of $8 million over Melania‘s opening weekend being higher than any other non-music, cinematically-released documentary movie, there is a small catch. The film that Melania has overtaken with the highest grossing opening weekend is the 2023 faith documentary After Death. Released by Angel Studios, that movie took around $5 million on its opening weekend, but, unlike Melania, only had a budget of $1.25 million. So while the new documentary is the highest opening of a documentary in 10 years, it is a victory as shallow as many have described the film in their reviews.

When the streaming service rose above Netflix, Disney, and Paramount Pictures in the bidding war for Melania, Prime Video also promised a follow-up docuseries. Could this one capture the ruin of her other-half as a great portion of their nation continues to campaign against his brutal handling of immigration?

Melania Trump has a new documentary out

Amazon MGM Studios

Typically, the Trump doc’s very first screening in front of the world’s media on Thursday, Jan. 29 was closed off to numerous outlets. According to Variety, critics from The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press were not granted entry into the Trump Kennedy Center, where Melania premiered, while most reporters other than One America News anchor Dan Ball were actively ignored on the red carpet. The makers clearly wanted to avoid any negative press that would affect its imminent release in cinemas.

Unfortunately for them, when those critics did finally get to view the documentary they were not kind in their analysis of what they saw. A snippet from Variety‘s review reads: “It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called Day of the Living Tradwife.” The Guardian awarded Melania just one star, before comparing the material to Jonathan Glazer’s Nazi Germany drama The Zone of Interest.

“Ratner’s film plays like a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and asset-strip the federal government … the fun’s not infectious and the guests are a nightmare, and two hours of Melania feels like pure, endless hell.”