5 Reasons Why Melania Flopped At The Box Office

It proved to be a surprisingly crowded weekend at the box office to help close out January. Though it was a slow month overall (as it often is), Sam Raimi's "Send Help" and Markiplier's "Iron Lung" made for an unexpectedly interesting duel for the number one spot. Left in a distant third place was Amazon's high-profile "Melania" documentary.

Serving as a look at First Lady Melania Trump, the wife of U.S. President Donald Trump, "Melania" opened to just $7 million domestically over the weekend. "Send Help" took the top spot with an estimated $20 million debut, while "Iron Lung" made a genuinely shocking $17.8 million, especially considering that it had next to no marketing budget and was produced wholly independently.

In stark contrast, "Melania" was acquired by Amazon MGM Studios for an eye-popping $40 million, in addition to a reported $35 million marketing spend. On the one hand, $7 million is a big opening for a documentary. On the other hand, the box office is all relative, and no studio would be happy with an opening of that size against a $75 million investment. Period. Speaking strictly from a financial POV, this is a flop, plain and simple, using any sort of rational calculation of success or failure at the box office.

So, what went wrong here? How on Earth did Amazon make such a grave miscalculation here? Is there any way to make this make sense? We're going to look at the biggest reasons why "Melania" bombed on opening weekend. Let's get into it.

Documentaries can be relatively popular and, in some cases, downright important. They can also be money-makers. As we speak, "Secret Mall Apartment" is one of the biggest movies on Netflix right now. But spending this kind of money on any film in 2026 is risky. Spending it on a documentary like "Melania," though? That's downright baffling, especially when we consider that the next-highest-bidders, such as Disney and Netflix, only offered about $14 million for the rights, per The Telegraph.

The documentary claims to offer "unprecedented access" to the 20 days leading up to the 2025 Presidential Inauguration through the eyes of the First Lady herself. It contains footage from critical meetings, private conversations, and supposedly "never-before-seen environments."

Without getting into the why when it comes to Amazon investing so much in "Melania," as that would be mostly speculative, from a dollars and cents perspective, it's just bad business. The doc made next to nothing overseas and will have very limited appeal internationally as it's very U.S.-centric. There's no reason to think it's going to be leggy enough to make up the difference in the weeks to come.

Yes, "Melania" will probably be streamed a fair amount on Prime Video. Yes, Amazon spends recklessly at times, such as spending $300 million on "Citadel" for some reason. But just as that made little sense, so, too, does investing $75 million in a documentary such as this. Maybe the brass at the company had its reasons, but if those reasons had anything to do with believing this movie could be a theatrical hit, the decision-making was divorced from objective reality.

Critics can't always move the needle for movies, but when it comes to documentaries, buzz is generally essential when it comes to getting people to get off the couch and head to a theater. Look at something like the 2018 Mister Rogers doc "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" Buzz got that to $22.8 million which was good for a documentary. But even a hulking marketing budget couldn't help to overcome the critical stink on "Melania."

The doc currently holds a very lousy 10% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In the spirit of fairness, it also holds a near-perfect 99% audience rating, along with an A CinemaScore. The people that saw it downright loved it. The problem? That only extends to the most hardcore Trump-loving, target audience out there. The marketing efforts couldn't overcome the critical stink or the lack of interest from anyone outside the core, unshakable target demo.

Word-of-mouth amongst the Trump crowd might well be positive in the coming weeks but by no means good enough to give this movie the legs it would need to be considered a hit (especially with well-liked movies such as "Send Help" out there vying for attention). Moreover, likely heavy-hitters such as "Wuthering Heights" and "Scream 7" will be arriving in the coming weeks. More casual moviegoers — who are needed to turn a movie at this price into a hit — are probably going to be put off by critical opinion and persuaded to spend their money elsewhere at the multiplex.

With better buzz outside of the most devoted target audience, who knows? But that's not the way it worked out.

One big elephant in the room has to do with simple facts and figures. Rather simply, very few documentaries in the history of cinema have made $100 million or more at the box office, which is what would be required to even begin to consider "Melania" an outright theatrical success.

The biggest of them all is "Michael Jackson's This Is It" ($268 million worldwide), but that was as much of a concert film as it was a documentary. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" ($222 million worldwide) remains the high bar for a pure documentary. Even so, the sequel "Fahrenheit "11/9" tanked at the box office in 2018. This to say, using history as our guide, even when the box office was booming before the Covid-19 pandemic upended the industry in 2020, this genre was never a big money-maker, generally speaking.

Even those who are framing the $7 million opening as "big for a documentary" might do well to remember that Taylor Swift's "The Official Release Party of a Showgirl" opened to $33 million domestically just a few months ago. Again, that was music based, but the point remains that trying to qualify this as a win relative to what documentaries can do and usually do commercially falls apart fairly quickly.

Even if one wants to go that route, it comes back to Amazon's sheer level of investment, which quickly nullifies said qualified win. There's no positive spin to be found, and it's incredibly hard to make it make sense on paper.

Though not necessarily a big issue for more casual viewers who don't pay attention to the ins-out-outs of Hollywood, one can't ignore the presence of director Brett Ratner when it comes to "Melania." This marks Ratner's first movie as a director since he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2017. He's not the kind of guy that can deliver a hit in the here and now. Beyond that, his name adds unnecessary and unwanted negative noise to any movie he's involved with.

Such is the case here. Not only does Ratner have his previous accusations to shoulder, but a Rolling Stone article detailed alleged "chaos" on the set and "slimy" behavior by the filmmaker. Again, such reports are woefully unhelpful when attempting to turn any movie into a commercial success, let alone a documentary with virtually no support from critics. Ratner's presence was at best unhelpful and at worst detrimental to this movie's success.

Hollywood has largely left Ratner behind. Having him direct this documentary makes about as much sense as having him direct "Rush Hour 4," which Paramount is set to distribute. That's yet another baffling financial decision on Paramount's part, which is a conversation for another time, but it was also one made reportedly at the behest of Donald Trump, per Variety. It's perhaps not surprising that Trump has ties to Ratner and both of these movies. Without commenting further on that, regardless of one's personal feelings, on paper, this director choice makes little-to-no practical sense.

This is not about personal politics. This is not about how I or anyone else feels about Melania Trump, Donald Trump, or anyone involved. But what has become inescapably clear in recent years, particularly in the pandemic era, is that movies are arguably, more than they've ever been, escapist entertainment.

The 2025 domestic box office failed to crack the $9 billion mark. It's more difficult than ever to get people to show up for any movie that isn't sold as an event worthy of the big screen experience. Despite Amazon shelling out big bucks to advertise "Melania" during NFL football and elsewhere, it's crystal clear that the masses didn't view this as must-see cinema. Not even close.

That's not to say that must-see cinema can't have a political message, but "Melania" is inescapably about the 2024 election, very directly. For the most part, people are looking to go to the movies to escape all of the political conversation that dominates the outside world, not necessarily engage with it more actively. Not for nothing, it's not like Donald Trump made a lot of friends in Hollywood when he threatened to put tariffs on movies made outside of the U.S., either. So, the likelihood of others within the industry encouraging people to see this doc were always going to be low.

Let's be crystal clear: This isn't limited to pro-Trump messages, either. 2024's "The Apprentice," which most certainly does not paint Trump in a favorable light, bombed at the box office with just $17.2 million worldwide. Maybe one day people will be able to capitalize on the Trump presidency through cinema, but now is evidently not the time.

"Melania" is in theaters now.