Melania: will Bezos-bankrolled documentary be a flop? – The Latest

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:11In the trailer you see her saying things like everybody wants to know, so here it is. And it's like, well, the things they want to know you're not going to tell us. Everyone wants to know. So here it is. Clearly what Amazon thought is that what it would cost them in terms of credibility and profits, it would easily make back in terms of buttering. I mean, Hollywood is absolutely capitulated to Trump at the moment. Why is Amazon paying millions of dollars for a documentary about Melania Trump that will almost certainly be a flop in the UK? From The Guardians today in Focus, this is The Latest with me, Lucy Ho.

0:59Well to help answer that question is Catherine Short, Guardian Film Editor. Thanks for being with us Catherine. So let's talk about the weekend because there were appalling events in the weekend another fatal shooting of a man in Minneapolis. There have been widespread protests across America but in the Trump White House if you thought that this was on his radar in any meaningful way he He was tweeting on his Truth Social platform about the attempts to thwart his£300 million ballroom. And he was also hosting a glitzy film premiere for his wife, Melania. It says something that we know about the dark nature of Trump's White House, but also the very curious nature of this film.

1:43Yeah, I mean, I think it's fairly standard practice for Trump to put on a gaudy, extraordinary display of vanity and tastelessness at a time of national tragedy and mourning and fear. That doesn't seem sort of that out of the ordinary. I mean, you say glitzy in the pictures. Actually, it looked a little bit cheap. I mean, the biscuits, it's all monochrome because that's Melania's vibe. and so there's sort of little M &Ms that are all black and macaroons that are black and white and biscuits that say Melania in big letters. So it was, yeah, it was glitzy. There was a very small popcorn machine with branded buckets with her face on and then there were VIPs, 70 VIPs, including Tim Cook, the Apple CEO and the Queen of Jordan and Mike Tyson.

2:32So a very exciting party. Yeah, and not Tim Cook's first visit to the White House, obviously but but let's talk about the circumstances of amazon acquiring this film because there was a real bidding war to get the rights to do it right they ended up paying 40 million dollars tell me about that process yeah i mean that's more than has ever been paid in history for any documentary which is um something yeah there was a bidding war i think the other sort of key players were Disney and Paramount. I mean, Amazon finally got it. Of course, Jeff Bezos and Trump are close allies and Bezos's interests in Amazon are closely aligned with a lot of the infrastructure of what's going on in America now.

3:16I mean, why would you pay that much money? Well, it's probably a steal. You don't probably get a good movie and you don't get any money back from that movie. I mean, Netflix have that relationship with the Obamas, don't they? And so they've already got that. So I think clearly what Amazon thought and other streamers and studios thought is that what it would cost them in terms of credibility and profits, it would easily make back in terms of buttering. I mean, Bezos has a huge history of buttering up Trump, doesn't he? But would also explain the other bidders in that process, which were Paramount and Disney, who have been engaged in their own efforts to court the House of Trump.

3:55That's right. I mean, Paramount's got this Skydance merger coming up and it needs the FFC approval for that. So it's not hard to see why people would want to get into bed with Trump. I mean, that's all people want to do. You also have to remember that the film industry at the moment is very, very precarious for lots of reasons. They're absolutely terrified of these tariffs that Trump is sort of wielding the threat of all the time. Also, Hollywood's in a very delicate position. It knows that it doesn't have any leverage. You know, all the stars campaigned very vociferously for Biden and then for Harris at the previous election.

4:32It was extremely embarrassing for them that that leverage didn't translate into any votes and they were absolutely shamed. And their lack of influence in the world was really highlighted by that. So they're in a very sort of coward position and Hollywood is absolutely capitulated to Trump at the moment. So let's look at the film itself. Melania, I think it's safe to say for any of us, is a bit of an enigmatic figure. She has been unsurprisingly heavily involved in every stage of the creative production of this documentary. And I was just reading that she apparently was even involved in the selecting of the scoring and the cliffhanger for the trailer.

5:11So it's not going to be scrutinising of her, is it? But it may well give us some information about things we don't know about her, which is not very much. Yeah, I mean, she's an enigma. I think the questions that people would like to have answered about her aren't necessarily the ones that will be answered by this film. I think she leaves herself open to inadvertent exposure by this one. But it's obviously entirely policed and controlled. And as you say, she's selected everything, including being in charge of the marketing campaign. So it follows her in the 20 days preceding the second inauguration.

5:45So, again, not necessarily a time period in which people are sort of scrutinizing her. It's not that period where she disappeared and there was all the body double talk. It's not really a moment of intense crisis for the Trump administration. I mean, she's sort of in the trailer. You see her saying things like, everybody wants to know. So here it is. And it's like, well, what are the things they want to know? You're not going to tell us. And here we go again. It's very anagriced. There's a big shot of a boot. I mean, there's going to be a lot about frocks, I think. It's going to be major on the frocks.

6:16So I am more excited about it now, having seen the trailer, because you've got this auteur. You've got this untrained auteur. I mean, Relani has never made a movie before, and here she is in charge of this great big film, all about her and the most powerful man in the world. She's paid herself$28 million of that$40 million. So that makes her a higher-paid star than the likes of Tom Cruise. So she's not only a big new filmmaker on the scene, she's also a big new star on the scene. A big new talent. Who knew? I know. It's very exciting to see this emerging talent come up in the film world. Well done.

6:51It truly is. But also the revival of the career of Brett Ratner, who listeners may recall as part of the huge Rush Hour franchise, who was accused of multiple accounts of sexual assault in 2017, which he strongly denied. The charges in all of those cases were eventually dropped, but he has been living sort of semi-in-exile in Israel in the years since then. His career fortunes also revived to work on this project. Yeah, very exciting to have Brett Ratner back. I mean, what a triumph. Yeah, he hasn't made a film since 2014's Hercules. And now he's got not only this film, he's also got the new Rush Hour because Trump expressed a desire late last year for another Rush Hour film.

7:38Julie Paramount greenlit that immediately. that's Larry Ellison the friend of Trump now runs that and so Brett Ratner's got these two major projects so that's very very exciting for him yeah I think also as well as living in Israel he may also reportedly now lives in a villa in Mar-a-Lago so yes quite a quite a sort of quite an integrated part of the Trump team now so Brett Ratner is now living at Trump's Florida home where he can work on his future Russia franchises what a world we are living in Catherine and just to talk I mean you mentioned that you slightly want are considering going to see the the film in cinemas the Melania documentary it doesn't sound like you'd have a hard time by buying a ticket based on your reporting for the Guardian today there's this being shown in a hundred cinemas across the UK right as part of Amazon's promotional budget but very very few tickets yeah so um it's a very interesting release strategy which one suspects Melania has had her handy.

8:39So it's being released in 5 ,000 cinemas across the world, 2 ,000 of which are in America, 3 ,000 of which are overseas, more than 100 in this country. I'm not sure quite the number. Very few tickets sold, slightly unsurprisingly. I mean, for a start, there's been no promotional budget spent here. In America, there's lots and lots, but none here at all. So you've got sort of the odds smashing when you look at websites and trying to figure out how many tickets have been sold occasionally you'll find sort of you know a few seats on the back row of some place in Halifax have been sold but but that's very unusual usually it's like one or possibly none so yes you wouldn't have a difficult time seeing it I think you know Amazon a they might need to buy some tickets themselves I mean they're already in for a penny in for a pound with this one they they you know they've spent such a lot of money from it I mean the sort of real story here is why would cinemas in this country agree to run this title what on earth is in it for them it's you know the end of january it's peak award season screen time for these cinemas it's you know lots of big titles vying for space so what on earth would be in it for cinemas who they usually run on the model of a revenue share between the distributor like amazon and the um and the exhibitor like sort of view or odian like that so that's not going to work because this isn't going to make any money.

10:01The idea, I think probably, and some pundits in the industry have suggested, might be this four-walling strategy whereby distributors actually pay exhibitors to run the film. So Amazon would be paying cinemas to run this film. It's a strategy. It's not a very sound financial one, but sometimes you've got to do what you've got to do. And that's the only possible thing I think that can be happening here because there is no possible way that cinemas would voluntarily agree to run this film. And yeah, I mean, I'm sort of quite excited now for Monday to see how badly it does. Well, if I see you in a cinema somewhere in Leicester Square by yourself on Monday night, I'll know something's gone badly wrong.

10:45Thank you, Catherine. Thank you. That's it for today. My huge thanks again to Catherine Shaw, The Guardian's film editor. You can keep up with her writing over at theguardian.com. That's it for today. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Latest, the new evening edition of Today in Focus. Today in Focus will be back with you as usual tomorrow morning and we'll be back tomorrow night. This episode was presented by me, Lucy Hoff. The producer was Bryony Moore. The lead producer was Zoe Hitch.

11:16This is The Guardian.