Melania drops 67% at US box office as Rotten Tomatoes defends record-breaking audience scores

Melania, Brett Ratner’s authorised documentary following the first lady in the 20 days preceding Donald Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, has dipped 67% in its second week of release in the US.The film outpaced expectations over its first weekend, taking in $7.2m domestically and leading Amazon to expand their rollout from around 1,500 venues to just over 2,000. But indications are that appetite had already been sated, with Sunday projections standing at $2.3m, meaning a drop from No 3 to No 10 in the US box office charts.Amazon pre-empted this disappointment with a statement on Saturday, flagging the film’s already healthy performance, as well as what they hope will be long streaming legs.“Melania’s strong theatrical performance is a critical first moment that validates our holistic distribution strategy, building awareness, engagement and provides momentum ahead of the film’s eventual debut on Prime Video,” said Amazon-mgm" class="entity-link entity-organization" data-entity-id="27617" data-entity-type="organization">Amazon MGM distribution chief Kevin Wilson.A streaming release date has not yet been announced.The film, for which Amazon paid $40m after a bidding war, and then spent a further $35m on marketing, was released in 26 countries worldwide (a South African release was abruptly cancelled at the 11th hour).Although international statistics are hard to source, the film has performed markedly less well across its some 3,000 overseas screens.Top performing territories include the UK, where it opened at No 29 in the chart, taking £32,974 for a £212 per screen average, as well as Australia and Melania Trump’s native Slovenia.Critics have almost universally slated the movie, with the Guardian’s Xan Brooks calling it “a gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest” and “two hours of pure, endless hell”.But audiences appear to have felt otherwise, leading to a record-breaking gap between the aggregate critics’ score and audience members’ equivalent on reviews curation site Rotten Tomatoes.On that site its official reviews rating is just 8%, yet it has a 99% score from cinemagoers on the “Popcornmeter”, with one user praising “the best documentary I’ve seen in years. The cinematography was superb, the soundtrack was excellent, and Melania herself was spectacular, a great movie which should receive numerous awards”.Rotten Tomatoes’s parent company Versant has rejected speculation that the latter figure was the result of a flood of fake reviews, telling Variety “there has been NO manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary”.They added: “Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning that it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film through Fandango”.However, there appears to be a striking disparity between the warmth of those reviews labelled “verified” because the users have bought a ticket through a particular site and those collected in “all audience reviews” – which do not count towards its rating.The former contains – as the 99% rating suggests – blanket praise and evangelism, with users urging “every red blooded American to see this movie to recognise the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic]” and applauding the lack of nudity and profanity.The users commenting appear in the overwhelming majority to be first-time posters, for whom Melania is their first review.Critiques in the “all audience reviews” section tend to derive from accounts with a deeper prior engagement on the site, and include assessments such as “I thought it would have been based on her actual life, good and bad. There was no emotion, drama or depth. It’s just a bad reality show,” and “Hot garbage. Don’t waste your time or money.”