An independent cinema in Oregon has claimed that Amazon cancelled screenings of its Melania Trump documentary in response to the venue’s irreverent marketing campaign.
According to the local paper the Lake Oswego Review, the Lake Theater & Cafe was told it could no longer show Brett Ratner’s authorised film about the former first lady after Amazon executives took issue with promotional slogans on the cinema’s marquee. These included lines such as: “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania” and “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!”
Writing on Instagram, the cinema’s general manager, Jordan Perry, said he received a phone call informing him that Amazon’s “higher ups” were unhappy with how the film had been advertised and that Sunday would be its final screening at the theatre. Perry added, jokingly, that he hoped Amazon would not retaliate by cancelling his Prime membership, and encouraged loyal Amazon customers to “show your support at Whole Foods instead”.
Perry also addressed criticism from those who questioned why he chose to screen the film at all. In a post titled Why I, Jordan, Got Melania Here, he explained that his main motivation was humour. “My overriding instinct was that the programming would be funny,” he wrote. There was also a practical consideration: the release schedule was thin. “The film marketplace this week and next were a desert,” he said, adding that booking “this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife” felt both commercially useful and absurd enough to suit his anti-establishment neighbourhood cinema.
The cancellation comes amid growing debate in the US over the film’s box office performance. Melania took $7m (£5.1m) in its opening weekend and debuted at No 3 in the US charts, despite reports of sparsely populated screenings. The Daily Beast has cited industry speculation that blocks of tickets may have been bought and distributed for free to inflate the numbers, though Amazon and major cinema chains AMC and Regal have denied seeing evidence of unusual bulk purchases.
Exit polls suggest the film’s audience skewed heavily towards older white women. In the UK, where Melania opened on 155 screens, the response was far more muted, debuting at No 29 with a modest screen average of £212. Nearly all of the film’s box office revenue has come from the US, with Slovenia emerging as its strongest international market. Industry figures have also questioned whether the unusually wide release points to a “four-walling” strategy, in which distributors pay cinemas directly to show a film.
