The legacy media must be devastated. Melania just had a huge box-office opening for a documentary, despite all the efforts to destroy the film before its release.
Deadline reports that Melania will finish the weekend in third place, with an $8 million opening.
Coming in at third is Amazon MGM Studios’ Brett Ratner-directed documentary Melania, which is eyeing $2.85M today (no previews) for an $8M opening in third place — that result would mark the best start for a docu in the last decade (beating Angel Studios’ 2023 doc After Death, which opened to $5M and finaled at $11.5M stateside). I’m hearing sales are gaining, with Florida and Texas quite large, for the First Lady’s big-screen debut.
According to Deadline, “EntTelligence showed Melania presales overindexing in rural areas with populations under 500,000.” The outlet noted that while “license fees plus marketing on this pic equals $75M.”
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“Are MAGA groups driving sales? Maybe, but that will be sussed out as the weekend goes on. Know this: This isn’t an Angel Studios release fueled by some semblance of fan sales or an Amazon Prime super-ticket.”
The film’s success isn’t just a win for Melania Trump. It’s a crushing blow to the mainstream media, which subjected the film to a relentless propaganda campaign aimed at undermining it.
And it’s equally devastating to the critics who thought they could tank it with their reviews. Over at Rotten Tomatoes, the film earns a mere 6% from critics, but a stunning 98% from fans. That gap tells you everything you need to know about the disconnect between the left-leaning critics and ordinary Americans. Donald Clarke of the Irish Times dismissed it as “shameless propaganda that could put you to sleep.” William Bibbiani of The Wrap was even more dramatic, calling it “a tedious, criminally shallow propaganda puff piece.”
“Brett Ratner’s tasteless, tedious, criminally shallow propaganda puff piece ‘Melania’ is nearly two hours of self-congratulatory torture,” Bibbiani wrote. “The film records the 20-day build-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration from the perspective of First Lady Melania Trump, and I have no idea why she was okay with this movie being released, because Brett Ratner couldn’t find the humanity in a funeral.”
Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter went with “an unabashed, fly-on-the-gilded-wall fawn job.” He wrote: “To say that Melania is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies. This is a film that fawns so lavishly over its subject that you feel downright unpatriotic not gushing over it.”
Kevin Fallon of the Daily Beast called it “an unbelievable abomination of filmmaking.” Several critics even compared the film to the work of Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, because, obviously, everything they don’t like gets the Hitler treatment these days.
None of this is surprising. It’s no shock that the left-leaning critics who dominate the film review world were going to hate it. You didn’t need a crystal ball to know they were going to trash the movie. That verdict was set the moment we learned the documentary was happening.
Personally, I haven’t seen it yet, and I’m not sure if and when I will. But I do take pleasure in knowing that the film’s success must be devastating to the propaganda machine that tried to take it down before its release and to the critics who are bashing it now. The American people spoke with their wallets, and they said something very different from what the critics wanted them to say.
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