The film’s rollout is huge — a $35 million marketing campaign that includes television commercials during NFL playoff games and a premiere simulcast in 25 theatres in the US. Starting Friday, the film hits 3,300 theatres worldwide.
The latest superhero movie?
Try Amazon’s all-hands-on-deck handling of Melania, which follows Melania Trump, the US First Lady, in the days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration. Melania produced the film, which was directed by Brett Ratner, who has not made a movie since 2017, when multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. He has denied those accusations.
Amazon paid Melania’s production company $40 million for the rights to Melania, about $26 million more than the next closest bidder, Disney. The fee includes a related docuseries that is scheduled to air later this year. The budget for Melania is unknown, but documentaries that follow a subject for a limited amount of time usually cost less than $5 million to produce. The $35 million for marketing is 10 times what some other high-profile documentaries have received.
All of which has a lot of Hollywood questioning whether Amazon’s push is anything more than the company’s attempt to ingratiate itself with President Trump.
“This has to be the most expensive documentary ever made that didn’t involve music licensing,” said Ted Hope, who worked at Amazon from 2015 to 2020 and was instrumental in starting the company’s film division. “How can it not be equated with currying favour or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?”
Thom Powers, the documentary programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival and host of the Pure Nonfiction podcast, called the deal “startling” because of Ratner’s involvement and because Amazon’s payment for the film had “no correlation to the marketplace”.
Some employees in Amazon’s entertainment division had similar concerns, according to three sources with knowledge of discussions inside Amazon. They were told that the project was mandated by the company’s leadership and that employees could not opt out of working on the film for political reasons.
Amazon, when asked for comment about its promotion of the movie, repeated a statement it had released in the past: “We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”
New York Times News Service