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Melania, Amazon’s $106m (US$75m) documentary about the US first lady, has bombed at the Australian box office on its opening weekend, debuting at No 31 on the charts and taking just $982 (£503, US$688) per screen.
The documentary, directed by Brett Ratner, was screened in 33 cinemas across Australia and made $32,399 overall.
Melania placed 31st, one spot below Wicked: For Good, which has been in Australian cinemas for over two months but still made $33,231 from 35 screens over the weekend.
Due to a worldwide embargo imposed by Amazon, Melania opened in Australia on Friday, meaning its opening weekend figures, which are usually calculated from Thursday to Sunday, missed out on one day’s takings.
However, opening weekend is generally the strongest for films without positive word of mouth to carry them along – and Melania has been widely lambasted as a blatant ploy by Amazon to curry favour with Donald Trump, meaning it has already likely peaked in Australia.
By comparison internationally, Melania was screened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland and took £32,974 (A$64,000) in its opening weekend, for a screen average of £212.80 (A$415).
In the US it had the strongest start of any documentary in over a decade, taking US$7m at the box office during its highly promoted opening weekend – but Melania cost significantly more than a typical documentary, at US$40m to make and US$35m to promote. In order to break even, the film will need to take around US$100m globally.
Donald Trump has told reporters he “wasn’t involved” in negotiations over the documentary’s huge price tag, while Melania Trump has said the producers approached several distributors, but “Amazon was the best because they agreed to do theatres all around the world”.
Ratner – who had otherwise largely retreated from Hollywood after numerous sexual misconduct allegations made during the #MeToo movement – has called the claims that his film was a favour for the Trumps “ridiculous”.
“I can tell you right now, if we were audited and they said, ‘How much was spent on this movie?’ This movie is one of the most expensive movies – documentaries – in the genre ever made,” he said at the Melania premiere. “It wasn’t about getting rich. I mean, I think the Trumps are wealthy and successful enough. This is about giving me the ability to hire the best crew in the world, to not only score the film with the best composer … I mean, when you see the movie, you’ll go, ‘Oh, we see where the money went now.’ This wasn’t about corruption.”
In his review, the Guardian critic Xan Brooks described the documentary as “dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing”.
“There is a decent documentary to be made about the former model from Slovenia, but this one is unredeemable,” he wrote.
The film is currently scoring 6% on reviews aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and has six out of 100 on Metacritic. Meanwhile it has a rating of 1.3/10 from more than 32,000 votes on the Internet Movie Database – an improvement on its earlier score of 1.0, which made it IMDb’s lowest-rated movie of all time.
