Amazon is somehow celebrating Melania‘s opening box office numbers as a success, even though the movie is still down nearly $68 million.
Melania earned roughly $7 million on opening weekend, a feat for the documentary genre, but far from earning back the $40 million Amazon spent on the rights to the film, and the additional $35 million spent on marketing. Amazon MGM Studios’ chief of domestic distribution, Kevin Wilson, is spinning the figures as a win.
“We’re very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response, with early box office for Melania exceeding our expectations,” Wilson told The Hollywood Reporter.
“This momentum is an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docuseries, extending well beyond the theatrical window and into what we believe will be a significant run for both on our service,” Wilson continued.
Melania follows Melania Trump in the 20 days before her husband Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon called it “a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review; it’s so expected and utterly pointless.”
The movie fell short of an initial Saturday projection of more than $8 million. The film still had one of the largest openings for a documentary of its kind in over a decade.
The film was directed by Brett Ratner, the Rush Hour director who has largely been absent from Hollywood following sexual misconduct allegations made against him in 2017. More than a dozen photographs of Ratner with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and unnamed women also surfaced in a tranche of documents from the Department of Justice on Friday.
Several crew members reportedly asked to scrub their names from the project, with one person saying they were “a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this.”
Many of the advertisements purchased with the $35 million marketing budget have been defaced with “extensive and severe” vandalism.
Still, the studio considers opening weekend a win and has high hopes for the long tail of Melania. “We are confident in the long-term value this rollout will deliver to customers both in theaters, and for years to come on Prime Video,” Wilson said to THR.
The Daily Beast reached out to Amazon MGM Studios for comment.
The First Lady previously announced a spin-off series for her documentary, which she said was coming in a “few months.”
The movie has been excoriated by most major publications and currently has a notably low 10 percent critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. Meanwhile, MAGA faithfuls flooded the review site with positive reviews, bringing its audience score up to 99%.
Melania reportedly crushed in red counties, particularly overperforming in Texas and Florida, according to Deadline.
Trump boasted about her documentary’s success in an X post on Sunday, saying the movie was “loved by all.”
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