It ought to come as no shock that Amazon’s documentary “Melania,” about First Girl Melania Trump, grossed $7 million on the field workplace over the weekend, making it the best opening for a non-music documentary in over a decade.
That’s not as a result of “Melania” is an exquisitely made, informative documentary. It’s not even a documentary.
As a substitute, it falls within the class of shiny commercial or unconvincing propaganda movie with a multimillion-dollar music licensing funds. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to movie. That supply got here with a jaw-dropping $35 million advertising and marketing funds, which Amazon spent whereas additionally slicing 16,000 company jobs.
The movie is the newest streamer-funded, fastidiously choreographed, boring, superstar puff piece being branded as a documentary. Earlier examples of documentaries on this class embrace “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” “With Love, Meghan,” and, most not too long ago, “Victoria Beckham,” a Netflix docuseries. (To be truthful, all three of these documentaries had been way more revealing than “Melania”; the one factor that one learns about Melania Trump throughout her 104-minute infomercial is that her favourite tune is Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”)
However the deserves of Brett Ratner’s “Melania” don’t matter. The movie is and can proceed to be a field workplace hit as a result of anti-woke, conservative, and faith-based documentaries thrive theatrically.
Take Matt Walsh’s 2024 “Am I Racist?” — a right-leaning movie that tears into variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The movie was that yr’s highest-grossing documentary, incomes $12 million on the field workplace. That very same yr, a documentary titled “Vindicating Trump” earned $1.3 million theatrically, which for any documentary as of late is some huge cash. “Vindicating Trump” was the sixth highest-grossing documentary in 2024.
Over a decade in the past, earlier than the Trump period, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America” and “America: Think about the World With out Her” grossed $33 million and $14 million on the field workplace, respectively.
It’s been over 20 years since progressive documentaries had been box-office juggernauts. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning movie “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a searing look into the George W. Bush administration and the Battle on Terror, grossed $119,194,771 worldwide, making it the highest-grossing documentary of all time.
In 2005, Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning characteristic documentary “March of the Penguins,” about world warming, earned $77,437,223 worldwide. That’s in stark distinction to the 2025 Oscar-winning characteristic documentary “No Different Land,” concerning the occupied Palestinian area of Masafer Yatta, which grossed $3.6 million worldwide. Different latest Oscar-winning documentaries, like “20 Days in Mariupol” and “Navalny,” earned simply $35,000 and $107,000 worldwide, respectively.
What the documentary business needs to be anxious about is what the field workplace success of “Melania” means for filmmakers motivated to make complicated nonfiction movies with a worldview that disrupt the established order and have the potential to offend President Trump and his MAGA base. Motion pictures not like “Melania.”
Eight years in the past, throughout “the golden age of documentary,” streamers like Amazon made it clear that though they had been company behemoths, they weren’t anxious about Trump, who was serving his first time period as president. In 2020, Amazon reportedly spent $5 million for world rights to Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” a couple of Louisiana lady’s 20-year effort to safe her husband’s launch from jail.
That very same yr, the corporate launched the documentary “All In: The Struggle for Democracy” about Stacey Abrams, the primary Black lady to grow to be a major-party gubernatorial nominee in the USA. In 2019, the streamer acquired the worldwide rights to the documentary “Mayor Pete,” which adopted democrat Pete Buttigieg on his presidential marketing campaign path, and in 2016 the corporate, owned by Jeff Bezos, acquired unique streaming rights to Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary about late writer James Baldwin who, within the movie, describes the miserable state of American race relations. Each “Time” and “I’m Not Your Negro” obtained Academy Award nominations.
However issues modified final yr when not solely Amazon, but additionally Paramount and Disney, went after the rights to “Melania.” It was a transparent and deliberate sign to the documentary business that they might not offend Donald Trump or his MAGA base with progressive documentaries.
Final month on the Sundance Movie Competition, documentary filmmakers and producers foundbased on a number of sources, that Amazon wasn’t out there to amass and fee any documentaries. Not surprisingly, the corporate’s 2026 funds for nonfiction fare has been utilized in its entirety to supply and launch “Melania.”
Amazon’s absence at Sundance is one other blow to an business that has been struggling to remain afloat. Not solely are conventional patrons like HBO not shopping for or commissioning as many documentaries as they did a decade in the past, however budgets throughout the board have additionally been slashed. Entire documentary divisions have been eradicated or consolidated. A24 shut down its documentary filmmaking division in Could 2025.
In January, the Company for Public Broadcasting shut down after the Trump administration and Congress voted to defund the group. CPB is the entity behind PBS, a cornerstone of the doc market.
Then there’s tech billionaire Jeff Skoll, the founder and chair of the previous socially aware powerhouse manufacturing firm Participant Media. Along with the late Diane Weyermann, Skoll produced and helped fund quite a few documentaries like “An Inconvenient Reality ” and “RBG” that fed the general public’s urge for food for thought-provoking material. In 2024, Skoll not solely closed Participant but additionally hosted a Donald Trump inauguration victory rally.
At the moment, the vast majority of indie documentary filmmakers are counting on an unsustainable self-distribution mannequin and the service-deal market.
In Park Metropolis, documentary filmmakers, producers, and cinematographers networked, hoping to land a job or on the very least, get a lead on a possible job alternative. However the writing is on the wall. The way forward for socially minded or politically progressive documentaries is in jeopardy, and there isn’t a left-leaning model of Jeff Bezos to swoop down and save the business.
Solely so many documentary filmmakers and producers may be employed to make extra nonfiction movies for streamers about celebrities, cults, and true crime. Celebrated documentary filmmakers and producers are turning to actuality tv for work. Some needed to work with Ratner on “Melania” to maintain financially afloat. In accordance with Rolling Stonetwo-thirds of the crew members who labored on “Melania” requested that their names not be formally credited within the documentary.
“I perceive if a liberal is engaged on the film and so they don’t need to be credited, however they need to feed their household,” Ratner instructed Selection. “I don’t blame anyone for that.”
It’s a scary time for documentarians. Will they’ve to start out working with the likes of Brett Ratner to make infomercials that please Donald Trump to pay the payments? The success of “Melania” suggests they could.
Different streamers like Apple, whose CEO Tim Prepare dinner attended the White Home premiere of “Melania,” may probably flip their again on the documentary group and try to make present occasion, politically minded documentaries disappear. HBO and Netflix are holdouts. Each firms nonetheless help social difficulty movies that sort out politics.
HBO’s “The Alabama Resolution,” a hard-hitting exposé of the brutal Alabama state jail system, and Netflix’s “The Excellent Neighbor,” a movie that takes purpose at America’s stand-your-ground legal guidelines, each obtained Oscar nominations in the very best characteristic documentary class this yr.” Later this yr, fingers crossed, HBO will launch Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary “Musk.”
With out well timed documentaries that confront energy and interrogate the reality, there’s a vacuum to be full of propaganda.