Critics have not been kind to Melania, the Amazon-funded documentary spotlighting First Lady Melania Trump. The $75 million project has been uniformly panned as propaganda, “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness,” “an obsequious, ring-kissing portrait of the current U.S. administration,” two hours of “endless hell,” and at least a dozen other variations on absolutely god-awful.
But MAGA is refusing to let professionals have the last word on the matter. Apparently arriving at theaters in droves, Trump supporters and FLOTUS fans have fueled ticket sales in excess of $7 million, helping Melania achieve the biggest opening for a documentary in the last decade. They have also taken to the review sites to heap boundless praise upon the first lady and her film. “Every red blooded American needs to see this movie to recognize the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic],” wrote a verified first-time reviewer on Rotten Tomatoes.
Positive audience reviews like that one have helped the Brett Ratner-directed documentary break a new record: the biggest disparity between critical reception and audience sentiment in Rotten Tomatoes’ history. A spokesperson for the review aggregator confirmed to Rolling Stone that Melania officially earned the dubious distinction on Wednesday evening. At press time, the film had a five percent score on the site’s Tomatometer — which represents the percent of positive reviews from critics — and a 99 percent score on its Popcornmeter, representing positive reviews from movie goers.
Melania, in fact, boasts the highest Popcornmeter rating for any film currently in theaters — surpassing the ratings of Oscars Best Picture nominees Hamnet and One Battle After Another, at 93 percent and 85 percent, respectively. (Melania’s 99-percent score is among individuals who Rotten Tomatoes confirmed purchased tickets for the film; among unverified movie goers, the film has a significantly lower 29 percent score.)
Rotten Tomatoes insists that Melania’s sky-high audience score is organic. “There has been NO manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary,” a company spokesperson told Rolling Stone in a statement. “Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film through Fandango.”
Rotten Tomatoes declined to say which film previously held the record for biggest disparity between audience reviews and critics score, but several other films that catered to right-wing audiences have similarly yawning gaps. Dennis Quaid’s 2024 presidential biopic Reagan was savaged by critics, earning just 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer while simultaneously notching 98 percent on the Popcornmeter. Critics’ ratings of the Daily Wire mockumentary Am I Racist?, released the same year, were 56 percent favorable, compared to 96 percent favorable reviews among ticket buyers. (The second largest disparity Rolling Stone could identify independently belonged to the Gold Rush-era romance Redeeming Love, which currently has a 11 percent Tomatometer score and a 95 percent Popcornmeter score.)
Over on IMDb, meanwhile, more than 44,000 ratings for Melania have been submitted, leading the website to plaster a notice of “unusual activity” at the top of the page. “Our rating mechanism has detected unusual voting activity on this title,” the alert reads. More than 87 percent of the ratings have given the documentary one star, compared to the four percent of raters who believed it earned the full 10 stars.
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“I can’t recall a theater filled with this much excitement and energy in a long time,” said one 10-star reviewer on IMDb. “And yes you can say it’s the story of an immigrant family that is realizing the American dream, however beyond all that, the movie is entertaining. I recommend to go see it in the theater. The vibe is real.” (That reviewer had rated only one other movie in their 10-year history of being on IMDb. “Born to Flop,” is how they described last fall’s Bruce Springsteen biopic, Deliver Me From Nowhere.)
IMDb did not return Rolling Stone’s request for comment seeking an explanation on how it verifies users who submit ratings, or what prompted it to issue an alert over Melania’s ratings surge.
Amazon MGM Studios acquired the rights for the documentary, which chronicles 20 days in the life of the once and future first lady ahead of her husband’s second inauguration, for $40 million just weeks after Donald Trump’s election. That extraordinary figure, the highest price the streamer has ever paid for a piece of content, far exceeded the $14 million reportedly offered by Disney during a bidding war over the rights to the film, and was widely regarded as a thinly-veiled attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration. (Jeff Bezos, who dined with the incoming president and first lady at Mar-a-Lago shortly before Amazon made its bid for the film, has extensive contracts with the federal government through both his cloud computing platform, Amazon Web Services, and his aerospace enterprise, Blue Origin.)
Melania is the first film director Brett Ratner has made since 2017, when he was publicly accused of sexual misconduct by six women. Production of the film itself, crew members told Rolling Stone, was marred by chaos and disorganization, with many members of the production team asking for their names to be uncredited. “I understand if a liberal is working on the movie, but they don’t want to be credited but they want to feed their family. I don’t blame anyone for that,” Ratner said when asked to respond to Rolling Stone‘s report at the film’s Kennedy Center premiere.
On top of the licensing fee, Amazon reportedly spent an additional $35 million to promote the film, which debuted in more than 1,700 theaters nationwide on Friday, Jan. 30. Amazon insists that its investment was money well spent.
“We’re very encouraged by the strong start and positive audience response,” Kevin Wilson, head of domestic theatrical distribution at Amazon MGM Studios, said in a statement released over the weekend. “This momentum is an important first step in what we see as a long-tail lifecycle for both the film and the forthcoming docu-series, extending well beyond the theatrical window and into what we believe will be a significant run for both on our service.”
From Rolling Stone US
