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The timing couldn’t be worse.
The week that her husband’s approval ratings hit record lows happens to be the same week that Melania Trump is debuting her self-titled documentary.
And if the early reviews and box office forecasts are any indication, the film is about to endure one of the worst receptions in modern Hollywood history.
On the review site Letterboxd, users have been bombarding Melania with horrendous feedback.
“I really don’t care, do u? ½ star,” wrote one user, referencing a slogan written on a jacket that Melania once wore, seemingly in response to her critics.
“I heard all of her lines are taken from a Michelle Obama documentary,” another wrote.
“Nobody asked for this absolute piece of flaming garbage,” a third chimed in.
A fourth critic was even more to the point, writing, “ABOLISH ICE. RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES.”
Many of those reviews have since been deleted, a move that many believe was made at the behest of someone working for the Trump administration,
Of course, the bad reviews are to be expected, and the Trumps will likely just chalk them up to vitriol from the “haters and losers” (although by most accounts, the film, directed by disgraced Hollywood exile Brett Ratner, is genuinely bad by just about any metric).
But what Donald and Melania may not have anticipated is the fact that the film is also on track to be a historic box office bomb.
Social media users in multiple cities have reported that in the theaters closest to them, every single seat is still available, meaning not a single ticket has been sold.
Of course, documentaries generally don’t make much money, and documentaries fawning about historically unpopular regimes are only of interest years later, once the threat is extinguished.
It’s enough to make you wonder why Amazon Studios and MGM (which is owned by Amazon) would shell out a reported budget of $75 million for such a risky venture.
Many believe the answer to that question is that Jeff Bezos did not expect an immediate return on his investment.
“They paid Melania Trump $28 million to make a movie absolutely nobody wanted to see. That’s called a bribe, folks,” wrote one user on X (formerly Twitter).
“The question we need to be asking about the Melania movie is what does Jeff Bezos want so badly from the Trump admin he was willing to spend $40 million of his own money making this crapola?” another chimed in.
Like Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos was critical of Trump during his first term in office, but he’s fallen into line for Trump 2.0.
So it’s not hard to see why so many are side-eyeing this particular venture (which reportedly placed a cool $28 million directly in Melania’s pocket).
Maybe Melania will defy the odds and pull in big box office numbers on the strength of word of mouth — but something tells us Bezos is content to wait for a different sort of compensation.
