Amazon MGM Studios’ documentary “Melania,” centered on First Lady Melania Trump, opens in U.S. theaters Friday, Jan. 30, with tracking that ranges from a soft start to a merely modest one. Theater-side estimates cited by TheWrap put the opening weekend around $3 million from roughly 1,500 locations, while Boxoffice.com projections cited by Bloomberg cluster lower at $1 million to $2 million. NRG, cited in both reports, sits at the high end with a forecast around $5 million.
The film arrives with a marketing plan that looks closer to a studio wide release than a typical nonfiction rollout. TheWrap reports Amazon paid about $40 million for rights and backed a campaign pegged at $35 million, including cable news buys, NFL playoff ads, digital pushes, themed tickets and popcorn buckets, and a Las Vegas Sphere stunt. TheWrap also notes a premiere at the recently renamed Trump–Kennedy Center. Amazon MGM said it bought the documentary “for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”
The bet runs into a theater market that rarely rewards documentaries at scale. “Documentaries are in a different category, and therefore box-office expectations are different than they are for a traditional film,” Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst, told Bloomberg. Still, past benchmarks show the ceiling: Bloomberg points to “Roadrunner” opening at $1.98 million in 2021 as a strong modern showing, while TheWrap cites the 2024 political doc “Am I Racist?” launching at $4.5 million and finishing at $12.3 million.
Advance sales overseas have also drawn scrutiny. Vue CEO Tim Richards told The Telegraph that early UK sales looked “soft,” while he defended booking the title on principle, arguing cinemas should not “play judge and jury to censor movies.” A separate industry analyst told the Guardian they suspected “four-walling,” where distributors pay theaters a fixed fee to guarantee playdates.
