Tangjiazhuang Melania Trump’s New Movie Is a Documentary. It’s Also a Tragedy

Apatity The First Lady probably should have plagiarized the plot of her film from a blockbuster hit.

Published Jan. 29, 2026 · 3:52 PM EST

Opinion

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images

Story by Michael Ian Black, The Daily Beast

“Is it safe?”

The minute-long trailer for the exciting new payoff documentary about our nation’s least popular First Lady, entitled Melania, features little dialogue. How striking then, that one of those few lines is the most famous phrase from the 1976 film, Marathon Man, starring Laurence Olivier as a Nazi war criminal dentist who tortures Dustin Hoffman while repeatedly asking, “Is it safe?”

Melania had its unofficial premiere at the White House last Sunday, while Alex Pretti’s blood was still fresh on the Minneapolis snow. Its guest list of 70 or so featured at least four accused sexual assailants, including the film’s director Brett Ratner. The other three? Tony Robbins, Mike Tyson, and the President of the United States.

(By the by, the official premiere, which takes place at the very empty, still officially titled Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts tonight, will also feature Dr. Phil in attendance, himself the subject of a 2021 sexual assault accusation.)

Astute film lovers may recall that the White House movie theater was demolished to make way for the soon-to-be-built, later-to-be-demolished Trump ballroom, so guests had to make do with an ad hoc screening room in the East Room.

Guests were treated to Melania sweets, Melania swag bags, a song composed for the film entitled Melania’s Waltz performed by a military band, and Melania herself resplendent in a tight-fitting, black-and-white gown designed by her stylist, Hervé Pierre, which is such a perfect name for somebody styling Melania that I had to double-check to make sure I wasn’t being pranked.

I was not and, in fact, the French-American Pierre has designed outfits for many First Ladies. Good for him.

Anyway, the pomp and glamor of the evening, while the country reeled from Pretti’s murder and a massive snowstorm, struck many as Melania’s “let them eat cake” moment, which strikes me as particularly unfair considering that the only pastries served at the event were specially designed black-and-white cookies emblazoned with the word “Melania.” No cake in evidence at all.

President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for a New Year’s Eve event at his Mar-a-Lago home on December 31, 2025 in Palm Beach, Florida. Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Early reviews of the film have been, predictably, snarky. More telling of the film’s likely success can be found in the empty movie theater seating charts being shared widely on social media. One cinema chain in the UK has predicted “soft” sales. According to The Guardian, “Just one ticket has been sold for the first 3.10 pm screening on Friday at its flagship Islington branch in London, while two have been booked for 6 pm.”

Domestic figures don’t look much more promising, with many analysts anticipating sales of somewhere between $1–5 million. That isn’t bad for a theatrically released documentary, but it’s terrible for one that Amazon purchased for $40 million plus—and then coughed up a reported $35 million in marketing. If you’re wondering how a documentary could cost forty million dollars, the answer is that Melania herself is said to have pocketed $30 million. All chump change to Jeff Bezos, of course, which somehow makes it even more unseemly.

To contrast, the highest-grossing documentary of all time, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, made over $220 million on a budget of $6 million.

If all of this is sounding very much like a vanity project designed to keep Bezos in the good graces of the administration and Melania off her husband’s back, I would suggest you’re being too cynical. After all, what other documentary promises an invitation for “global audiences… to witness this pivotal chapter unfold—a private, unfiltered look as I navigate family, business, and philanthropy on my remarkable journey to becoming First Lady of the United States of America.”

Wow. That really does sound pivotal.

As an aside, when she says she’s navigating “business,” what business is that, exactly? And, I’m sorry, what philanthropy? Perhaps Mrs. I Really Don’t Care, Do U? considers being married to Donald Trump an act of charity. No disagreement there.

According to the writer and my fellow Daily Beast contributor Michael Wolff, the future ex-Mrs. Trump was “bigly upset” that her party ended up overshadowed by the assassination of a 37-year-old ICU nurse. One can understand why—after all, the event had been planned months before. Various bootlickers, grifters, and MAGA opportunists had flown in for the occasion. What were they supposed to do, cancel just because federal agents are murdering people in the streets? That’s not how Melania rolls.

First Lady Melania Trump waves after delivering remarks prior to ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York on January 28, 2026. ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images

Or, at least, that’s not how I think she rolls. I actually have no idea because she’s the most inscrutable First Lady in our nation’s history. One can empathize with a political spouse uncomfortable in the spotlight, but how do we square that picture with the Melania who posed nude for a photo shoot on Donald’s 727 before he entered politics? Is she only demure when it suits her?

If so, I think it’s safe to assume that anybody looking to learn anything substantive about the third Mrs. Trump from watching what she describes as her “latest” film—are there others?—is likely to leave the theater just as disappointed as the suckers who bought her $MELANIA meme coin, currently trading around -98% of its initial value.

I haven’t seen Melania. Like most of you, I will never see Melania. Frankly, I’m not sure the Daily Beast could pay me enough even to hate-watch the thing, although I’m certainly willing to entertain offers. Perhaps it’s unfair to imagine that no gauzy Ratner-directed flick could erase my impression of Melania as anything more than a craven opportunist far more interested in her fingernails than her adopted nation. Hats off to the First Lady—she got hers. And now, we’re getting ours.

It’s too blithe a joke to say that her alleged refusal to screw her husband explains why her husband is screwing the rest of us. After all, Donald Trump was ripping off people long before his best friend Jeffrey Epstein allegedly introduced him to the former Melania Knauss. Who could have imagined on that fateful day that the middling Slovenian model would one day have her very own American box office flop? This really is the land of opportunity.

So, is it safe? For the Trump mafia clan and the oligarchs in their orbit, yes. For the rest of us, I’m not so sure. What I do know is that Melania opens on over 1,500 movie screens this weekend. And it is safe to say that tickets remain very much available.

The Academy Awards made history, and the message is clear: genre films have arrived.

The 98th Oscar nominations reveal an industry wrestling with its own contradictions. The films that make money rarely win trophies. The movies that win trophies rarely fill theaters.

This year’s nominations suggest that tension might finally be cracking.

What we’re seeing is less a revolution than an acknowledgment of reality. The Academy can only pretend for so long that the films dominating culture don’t deserve recognition. The question is whether this year represents genuine change or just another exception that proves the rule.

• The Academy finally caught up to audiences.
  Ryan Coogler’s Sinners shattered the all-time Oscar nomination record with 16 nods, surpassing Titanic, All About Eve, and La La Land. This is a horror-action film, the kind of movie the Academy has spent decades ignoring.

The record forces a question: why did this take so long? Horror directors build dread through lighting and sound design. Action choreographers create visual poetry through movement. These are the same tools prestige filmmakers use, just deployed toward different ends.

The breakthrough is that voters are finally acknowledging what ticket buyers have known all along. Movies that scare you can be just as artfully constructed as movies that make you cry about historical injustice. The Academy treated genre cinema like a guilty pleasure rather than legitimate art. Sinners forces a reckoning with that bias.

• The split between what Hollywood makes and what it honors keeps widening.
  Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another earned 13 nominations, representing the auteur-driven cinema that has always played well with Oscar voters. Meanwhile, superhero films, horror franchises, and action spectacles dominate theatrical revenue while prestige dramas struggle to fill seats.

The nominations expose this tension. F1, Frankenstein, and Superman appear in various categories because these are the films studios actually invest in and audiences actually see. The industry keeps trying to have it both ways: make money from spectacle, give awards to intimacy.

Can the Academy keep pretending the films that define modern moviegoing are somehow less worthy than the ones that play to half-empty art houses? The Coogler record and the Anderson haul suggest an uneasy compromise where both can coexist. But the underlying question about what movies matter remains unresolved.

• Franchise fatigue is real, and voters just sent a warning shot.
  Wicked: For Good received zero nominations after its predecessor Wicked earned 10 the previous year. This is brutal and instructive.

Hollywood has spent the last decade betting billions on brand recognition over originality. Studios keep greenlighting follow-ups based on spreadsheets rather than creative vision, assuming audiences and voters will show up for anything with a familiar title.

Wicked: For Good proves that assumption wrong. The shutout suggests voters are tired of watching studios squeeze every drop from intellectual property. The sequel earned nothing not because sequels are inherently inferior but because this particular sequel apparently brought nothing new.

Even big-budget spectacles like Superman had to demonstrate craft and vision to compete. The nominations reward films that justify their existence beyond box office projections. The lesson for Hollywood is uncomfortable: you can’t franchise your way to prestige.

It only took a record-breaking horror film to teach the Academy what audiences already knew.

Quentin Tarantino has a problem. His ninth film already feels like his last.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood made about $392 million, won Oscars, and became a late-career masterpiece, which is a dangerous thing when you have promised the world exactly one more movie.

That is the pickle.

Tarantino has always said he will make 10 films and then walk away, and Hollywood is number nine, which means the final chapter of one of the great American film careers is now stuck trying to top a movie that already feels like a farewell.

Django Unchained may still hold his box-office crown at $450 million, but Hollywood did something rarer by uniting critics, audiences, and awards bodies around the idea that Tarantino had finally made his most mature and emotionally complete work.

It plays like a summation of his obsessions and his love for a vanished Los Angeles, and it does so with the confidence of someone who knows he has reached the end of something.

That makes film number ten almost unfairly doomed.

What does topping Hollywood even look like. Does he go back to pulp violence and risk looking like he is retreating. Does he make a three-hour epic and get accused of self-indulgence. Does he try something radically different and get told he has lost the thread.

Every option is a trap because the tenth film does not just need to be good, it needs to justify why it exists after a movie that already doubled as a eulogy for the Hollywood Tarantino loved and the career he built inside it.

Every director dreams of making a Godfather Part II, but most careers end up being judged by their Godfather Part III, and Tarantino made that risk unavoidable by announcing a fixed number just as his work was still hitting its stride.

At the same time, he has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

In recent interviews he went after Paul Dano, calling him the weakest actor in SAG and taking a swipe at a performance most of Hollywood considers one of the great supporting turns of the last 20 years.

When Tarantino used to talk this way it came off as swagger. Now it reads as nerves.

The industry has changed, the audience has changed, and the culture no longer treats auteurs as untouchable. Tarantino built his career on being the smartest guy in the room about film history, but that currency has depreciated. His final film is not just competing with his own filmography, it is arriving in a moment that may not care about auteur legacies the way it used to.

That is what makes the 10th so thorny.

But the solution is hiding in plain sight.

For years Tarantino has insisted that Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 are one film.

He should change that.

The world already treats them as two movies with separate runtimes, release dates, reviews, and box-office totals. Calling them two films would not be a trick, it would be an acknowledgment of how they actually exist in culture. Kill Bill becomes numbers eight and nine. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood becomes number ten. The story ends exactly where it should.

Would critics call it a cop-out. Probably. Would it require Tarantino to reverse a twenty-year position. Yes. But the alternative is worse, which is spending years trying to make a film that has to beat a movie that already feels like a closing argument.

He could even frame it as principle by announcing that streaming killed the Hollywood he wanted to make films for, that the theatrical era ended before he could deliver his finale, and that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was the last movie made in the world he cared about.

Either way, the math works.

Either way, the pressure disappears.

The only way Quentin Tarantino avoids being crushed by his own legend is by admitting that he has already made the movie that ends it.