President Donald Trump claimed that Melania: Twenty Days to History, the documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, was the “number one movie of the year,” despite offering no evidence to support the assertion.
Donald remarked while addressing supporters at Red Rock Casino Resort Spa in Las Vegas, Nev., during a speech focused primarily on tax breaks on overtime pay and tips included in legislation he signed into law.
The president’s comments followed a digression about communism and Democratic-run cities.
“One of the things I’ve seen with Communism throughout the world, I see a lot of different places being president, I see a lot of results, a lot of bad results when you have the wrong people and the wrong ideology,” Donald told the crowd. “But one of the things I see and you see it here, the blue states run by Democrats, everything’s filthy, dirty all the time. The cities stink, they smell, the sidewalks [are] loaded was horrible stuff.”
He then shifted to defending his wife’s reaction to his habit of imitating transgender athletes at rallies before praising her documentary.
“I don’t want to use the term because my wife… she hates it when I use the term. She doesn’t love it. She hates it when I imitate… no men in women’s sports. She hates it when I do the weight lifter. She said, ‘It’s not presidential.’ I said, ‘Well, it may not be presidential, but I won the election in a landslide,’ so I don’t know,” Donald said. “Well, she’s very elegant. You know, Melania says hello to everybody. By the way, but she’s very, very elegant, she did a movie, I think it’s the number one movie of the year. She’s very elegant.”
Box office figures contradict the claim
Donald’s characterization of the documentary as the year’s top movie is not supported by box office data.
The documentary earned about $16.4 million domestically and nearly $3,00,000 internationally during its theatrical run after opening to roughly $7 million. Even in its debut weekend, the documentary ranked No. 3 at the box office behind YouTuber Markiplier’s The Iron Lung and Sam Raimi‘s Send Help.
The film disappeared from IMDb’s domestic box office rankings within weeks. Its international performance was weaker. The documentary was pulled from release in South Africa before its scheduled debut and underperformed across hundreds of screenings in the United Kingdom.
Critics on social media quickly challenged the president’s claim.
“‘Number one movie of the year’ Suuuuure it is buddy. This is classic dementia presentation,” one user wrote on X after Donald’s Las Vegas remarks.
Another user responded by saying, “This man has no concept of the truth. He lies about everything.”
This was not the first time Donald made the claim. Speaking to Republican members of Congress at an event in Washington, D.C., he said, “And our great First Lady, who now turns out to be a fantastic movie star — Do you believe this? She had the number one movie, and now she’s number one on streaming.”
He went on to joke that “you can’t have two stars in one family,” calling it “not a good sign” and describing an imagined exchange in which he congratulated his wife on being “number one.”
The documentary’s production and release
Melania: Twenty Days to History, directed by Brett Ratner, opened on about 1,500 screens in late January.
Amazon MGM Studios reportedly paid about $40 million for distribution rights to the film and a companion docuseries, then spent another $35 million on marketing, a figure described as unprecedented for a nonfiction film. The campaign included a large advertisement projected on the Las Vegas Sphere to mark the first anniversary of Donald’s January 20 inauguration.
Donald joined Melania on the black carpet at the Kennedy Center for the film’s premiere, ahead of its January 30 theatrical release.
Asked to describe the production in three words, Melania replied it was “beautiful,” “emotional,” “fashionable” and “cinematic,” adding that “the people will judge it for themselves.”
Financial picture remains grim for Amazon
Because movie theaters typically keep about half of opening-weekend ticket sales, Amazon’s share of the film’s opening gross was estimated at roughly $3.5 million, a small fraction of its production and marketing costs.
Two weeks into its run, the documentary had earned $13.5 million domestically and was projected to finish between $16 million and $20 million. While that would rank it among the higher-grossing political documentaries of recent years, it remained well short of recouping its costs.
For comparison, 2018’s RBG earned $14.4 million domestically, while Won’t You Be My Neighbor? grossed $22 million.