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'Melania' Arrives With Strong Box Office Showing for a Documentary
I'm just telling you what it says.
‘Melania’ Arrives With Strong Box Office Showing for a Documentary
Amazon backed up the Brink’s trucks to promote the vanity film, resulting in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8 million, or 60 percent more than expected.
The first lady, Melania Trump, at a screening of “Melania” at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., on Thursday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Brooks Barnes
Reporting from Los Angeles
Jan. 31, 2026, 3:19 p.m. ET
Amazon’s gold-plated rollout for Melania Trump’s documentary is likely to result in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8.1 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts projected on Saturday. That would give “Melania” the best start for a documentary (excluding concert films) in 14 years.
It would be a face-saving result for the first lady — just a few days ago, ticket sales were pacing at about $5 million — but not for Amazon, which spent an exorbitant $75 million to buy distribution rights to “Melania” and market its release. Theater owners keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales, meaning that Amazon would end the weekend with about $4 million to show for its investment. (Overseas ticket sales are expected to be negligible. Specific estimates were not yet available on Saturday. Analysts project weekend ticket sales by collecting Friday sales data from various theater circuits, measuring presales for Saturday and Sunday and extrapolating from there.)
EntTelligence, a research firm, estimated that theaters in rural areas would contribute roughly 46 percent of the opening-weekend total for “Melania,” far higher than is typical for a film opening. Republican counties would also over perform, contributing about 53 percent of ticket sales, according to EntTelligence. Top states included Florida, Texas and Arizona. ... The audience was overwhelmingly female (72 percent) and over the age of 55, according to Amazon.
At the Cinemark Valley View in Cleveland on Friday, the audience for a “Melania” screening included a couple of buses worth of people from a nearby senior center. “It was a nice fluff piece,” Gordon Wilson, 80, said as he exited. Another Cleveland attendee, Anita Dloniak, 68, chuckled when she heard that some of the other ticket buyers called the film propaganda. “What did they think it was going to be?” she said.
{snip}
Ida Lieszkovszky, Michaela Towfighi, Nicole Danna and Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting.
Brooks Barnes is the chief Hollywood correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the entertainment industry for 25 years.
Amazon backed up the Brink’s trucks to promote the vanity film, resulting in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8 million, or 60 percent more than expected.
The first lady, Melania Trump, at a screening of “Melania” at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., on Thursday. Doug Mills/The New York Times
By Brooks Barnes
Reporting from Los Angeles
Jan. 31, 2026, 3:19 p.m. ET
Amazon’s gold-plated rollout for Melania Trump’s documentary is likely to result in opening-weekend ticket sales of roughly $8.1 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts projected on Saturday. That would give “Melania” the best start for a documentary (excluding concert films) in 14 years.
It would be a face-saving result for the first lady — just a few days ago, ticket sales were pacing at about $5 million — but not for Amazon, which spent an exorbitant $75 million to buy distribution rights to “Melania” and market its release. Theater owners keep roughly 50 percent of ticket sales, meaning that Amazon would end the weekend with about $4 million to show for its investment. (Overseas ticket sales are expected to be negligible. Specific estimates were not yet available on Saturday. Analysts project weekend ticket sales by collecting Friday sales data from various theater circuits, measuring presales for Saturday and Sunday and extrapolating from there.)
EntTelligence, a research firm, estimated that theaters in rural areas would contribute roughly 46 percent of the opening-weekend total for “Melania,” far higher than is typical for a film opening. Republican counties would also over perform, contributing about 53 percent of ticket sales, according to EntTelligence. Top states included Florida, Texas and Arizona. ... The audience was overwhelmingly female (72 percent) and over the age of 55, according to Amazon.
At the Cinemark Valley View in Cleveland on Friday, the audience for a “Melania” screening included a couple of buses worth of people from a nearby senior center. “It was a nice fluff piece,” Gordon Wilson, 80, said as he exited. Another Cleveland attendee, Anita Dloniak, 68, chuckled when she heard that some of the other ticket buyers called the film propaganda. “What did they think it was going to be?” she said.
{snip}
Ida Lieszkovszky, Michaela Towfighi, Nicole Danna and Emmanuel Morgan contributed reporting.
Brooks Barnes is the chief Hollywood correspondent for The Times. He has reported on the entertainment industry for 25 years.
18 replies
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Based on matinee and eary Friday evening sales. Which of course were perfectly on the level, I'm sure.
