{"id":18534,"date":"2026-02-02T10:20:33","date_gmt":"2026-02-02T10:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/melania-documentary-beats-expectations-at-box-office\/"},"modified":"2026-02-02T10:20:33","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T10:20:33","slug":"melania-documentary-beats-expectations-at-box-office","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/melania-documentary-beats-expectations-at-box-office\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Melania\u2019 documentary beats expectations at box office"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Despite a brutal critical reception<\/a>“Melania,” the documentary about the first lady released on January 30, outperformed expectations in its opening weekend.<\/p>\n

“Melania” earned more than $7 million at the domestic U.S. box office, the highest opening for a non-concert documentary in decades. Most recently, the best-performing film in the same genre was Stephen Gray and Chris Radtke’s “After Death,”<\/a> which opened at around $5 million domestically in 2023. With an opening box office of almost $24 million, Michael Moore’s 2004 film “Fahrenheit 9\/11” remains the highest-grossing political documentary.<\/p>\n

Critics, however, have been less kind to “Melania.” The documentary has received an aggregate rating of 10% among professional critic reviews on Rotten Tomatoes<\/a> (which is owned by Versant, MS NOW’s parent company), and negative<\/a> reviews<\/a> from major<\/a> news<\/a> outlets<\/a> abound<\/a>. Writing for MS NOW, media critic Jen Cheney said the film<\/a> is “so devoid of substance that it feels wrong to call it a documentary” and suggested “This thing is basically ‘Let Them Eat Cake: The Movie,’” invoking Marie Antoinette, the French queen beheaded during the revolution.<\/p>\n

Still, the film about the model-turned-political figure found its audience. Media analytics company Comscore reported<\/a> that roughly 72% of Melania’s audience during opening weekend were women, and 72% were over the age of 55. The majority of the movie-goers were also white.<\/p>\n

Directed by Brett Ratner in his first film since he faced accusations of sexual abuse<\/a> (allegations he has denied), “Melania” outperformed expectations out of the gate but has far to go before it becomes profitable: Amazon’s MGM Studios paid $40 million to license the film and another $35 million to promote it.<\/p>\n

“We’re very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response, with early box office for ‘Melania’ exceeding our expectation,” said Kevin Wilson, Amazon MGM Studios’ head of domestic theatrical distribution.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n

Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feb. 1, 2026, 4:58 PM EST Despite a brutal critical reception“Melania,” the documentary about the first lady released on January 30, outperformed expectations in its opening weekend. “Melania” earned more than $7 million at the domestic U.S. box office, the highest opening for a non-concert documentary in decades. Most recently, the best-performing film in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-trump"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}