The Guardian offers this helpful review so you don’t have to suffer through the Trump disinformation flood yourself.

No doubt there is a great documentary to be made about Melania Knauss, the ambitious model from out of Slovenia who married a New York real-estate mogul and then found herself cast in the role of a latter-day Eva Braun, but the horrific Melania emphatically isn’t it. It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a medieval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne.

The Melania release is a coordinated takedown of the entire film industry

Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million to acquire a documentary and spent another $35 million marketing it — making it the most expensive documentary in history. Some argue it was a bribe. Some argue it was marketing. Neither achieve the full scope of the attack on American filmmaking.

It was pushed to 1,778 screens and announced a $7 million opening weekend, which was reported as “best documentary opening in a decade” and causing “shocks at the box office.”

The numbers are fake.

The theaters were empty.

The real function of the $75 million wasn’t to make a film. It was to destroy the infrastructure that produces documentary films.

The Fraud Arithmetic

The simple math on 600,000 admissions across 1,778 theaters over three days gives us about 28 people per showing. That means a film that cost $75 million had a per-theater average of $3,937 for the weekend. Each theater would have generated about $1,300 per day across multiple showings.

Compare that investment-to-return ratio to every actual documentary:

Film	Investment	Opening	Ratio	Result
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)	$21M	$23.9M	0.9:1	Recouped day one. $222M worldwide.
RBG (2018)	~$3M	Limited	—	$14M total. Organic word-of-mouth.
Am I Racist? (2024)	~$5-10M	$4.5M	~1.5:1	Profitable. $12M total.
Fahrenheit 11/9 (2018)	~$15M	$3.1M	4.8:1	Flop.
Melania (2026)	$75M	$7M	10.7:1	WORST RATIO in documentary history.

Melania’s cost-to-opening ratio is a tragedy at 10.7 to 1. It needs to outgross every non-concert documentary in history including Fahrenheit 9/11 just to break even.

With twice the theaters and twelve times the $6 million production budget of Fahrenheit 9/11, it generated one-third the revenue and one-seventh the per-theater performance.

That’s a historic disaster. A catastrophic flop.

We also can compare what happened per screen in a market attacked by astroturfing versus the other markets:

Market	Screens	Per-Screen	Bulk Buying?
United States	1,778	$3,937	Yes — GOP clubs, faith coalitions, Craigslist ads
Australia	33	$982	No
UK and Ireland	155	$275	No

The US number is four times Australia and fourteen times the UK. That differential maps into documented bulk-purchase operations that exist in the US and nowhere else. Strip the astroturfing and this film performed at under $1,000 per screen, which is approximately nothing.

As Rotten Tomatoes noted:

The only documentaries to ever gross as much as Melania needs to make to turn a profit for Amazon are Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour ($178.9 million) and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119.1 million).

The industry analyst David A. Gross put it like this:

This is a political investment, not a for-profit movie venture. If it helps Amazon with a regulatory, taxation, tariff or other government issue, then it will pay back. $75 million is insignificant to Amazon.

But that’s not what this is really about. It’s active suppression of political speech.

The Empty Theaters

Wired analyzed 1,398 showings across 329 American theaters on Fandango. Of those, exactly two were sold out before the premiere, a rate of 0.14%. Meanwhile, journalists and social media users documented what they found when they actually checked:

Location	Documented Attendance
Los Angeles (4 theaters)	5 total tickets sold on Friday night
Orange County AMC	Zero tickets on Saturday
Boston AMC Common 19	1 ticket across 3 showtimes; 7 total across four Friday showings
Jacksonville, FL	Zero tickets for opening night
Minneapolis	Theater cancelled all screenings
Manhattan	20% discounts due to low attendance
UK (100+ cinemas)	Most showings sold no tickets at all
Mexico City	15 of 27 showings had zero tickets sold; average 2.9 per showing

If theaters across Los Angeles, Boston, Jacksonville, Manhattan, the UK, and Mexico City are documented as empty, where are the 600,000 people?

The answer is simple. It’s all political astroturf. The GOP ran a ticket stuffing campaign to stuff the sales numbers. They want the film to appear successful, and don’t care if anyone watches it. They care that nobody can watch anything else.

The International Control Group

Outside the United States, there are no GOP clubs buying out screenings, no Craigslist ads paying people to sit in seats, no National Faith Advisory Board promoting bulk purchases. What you see in international markets is organic demand for this film.

It is essentially zero.

Australia: 33 cinemas. $32,399 total. That’s $982 per screen for the entire weekend — roughly 82 tickets per cinema across three days. The film debuted at #31, one spot below Wicked: For Good, which had been in theaters for two months.

UK and Ireland: 155 cinemas. £32,974 total. That’s £213 per screen — approximately 15-20 tickets per cinema for the entire weekend.

The US per-theater average was $3,937 putting it four times higher than Australia. That differential maps precisely onto the documented bulk-purchase operations that exist in the US and nowhere else.

On IMDb, the film holds a 1.3 out of 10 from over 32,000 votes. It was previously rated 1.0, which sets it at the lowest-rated film in the database’s history. On Metacritic: 6 out of 100. Rotten Tomatoes critics score: 6%.

The Numbers Were Manufactured

The evidence of coordinated astroturfing comes from multiple independent sources.

Rob Shuter, entertainment columnist (Naughty But Nice Substack), reported on January 28 from multiple GOP insiders:

This isn’t organic demand. It’s about optics. Empty theaters look terrible.

They’re struggling to give the tickets away. Some screenings barely sell unless the party steps in.

If the GOP didn’t buy the seats, no one would.

Roger Friedman at Showbiz411 named specific organizations and documented the operations:

1. Miami: The Federated Republican Women of Miami and The Old Cutler Republican Women’s Club bought out the 6:30pm Coconut Grove showing on January 30, reselling at $35 through their website. Attendees were required to provide employer information and occupation.
2. Bakersfield, CA: The local Republican Party bought out the 7:30pm showing January 31, offering free tickets to members and $10 to non-members. Of the entire screening, only 14 seats were claimed.

The New Republic confirmed:

The situation has become so dire that conservative groups have gotten involved, buying out entire blocks of seats or even whole screenings in a flagrant effort to save face for the president.

The Hollywood Reporter noted the obvious with characteristic understatement:

Granted, it’s possible that Melania — or another wealthy benefactor — is buying out blocks of tickets in advance but … come on. Since when has anybody named Trump ever tried to rig the numbers?

Tom Brueggemann, former IndieWire editor and veteran box office analyst, published the professional forensics on his Substack. He identified an uptick in ticket purchases on Wednesday two days before release consistent with coordinated bulk buying rather than organic consumer behavior. His industry sources confirmed:

…blocks of tickets were purchased for the weekend, then distributed to senior citizen homes, Republican activists, other interested parties for free to help boost audiences.

Meidas News documented that the National Faith Advisory Board — a faith coalition led by Trump advisor Paula White-Cain sent emails promoting bulk ticket purchases and private screenings. This is a White House-adjacent organization actively coordinating ticket buying.

Paid Attendance: A Craigslist ad in Boston offered $50 and free tickets to attend the film, with the requirement to “remain in seats for entirety of film.” The ad was removed after going viral, with a follow-up note saying counsel had advised that “proceeding would run afoul of campaign finance laws.” In Deadline’s comment section, at least one person wrote:

I was paid $50 to sit in a seat during Melania and was on my phone with headphones.

The Walk-Up Cover Story: The official explanation for the gap between near-zero pre-sales and the $7 million opening is that 72% of tickets were bought as walk-ups, and disproportionately women over 55. This is the demographic most likely to pre-purchase tickets, not least likely. The walk-up claim conveniently fills the exact gap that cannot be independently verified the way online pre-sales can.

The Exit Poll Tell: Opening day audience self-identified as 49% Republican, 2% Democrat. 47% conservative. 28% Evangelical Christian. 74% Caucasian. This is the demographic profile of GOP club members and organized political operatives, not random moviegoers.

The $75 Million Bribe

Melania Trump personally received approximately $28 million from the deal mainly for corruption. Amazon paid $26 million more than the next-highest bidder (Disney, at $14 million). The marketing budget of $35 million was roughly ten times the size of any comparable documentary campaign. RBG’s marketing budget was $3 million. Fahrenheit 9/11’s was an estimated $15 million.

This happened while Amazon seeks regulatory favor from the Trump administration on tariffs, antitrust enforcement, and AWS government contracts. Jeff Bezos’ Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration. The documentary itself features Melania praising the “elegance and sophistication of our donors” as the camera drifts past Bezos.

Ted Hope, the former co-head of movies at Amazon Studios, told the New York Times:

How can it not be equated with currying favor or an outright bribe? How can that not be the case?

Former Office of Government Ethics Director Don Fox said this of the documentary:

seemed like it was meant to curry favor.

Documentary filmmaker Kyle Henry stated that Melania was

not a documentary… a campaign advertising and a bribe.

Julie Cohen, who co-directed RBG, criticized the film as having “no artistic or journalistic integrity” and questioned the price Amazon paid.

Brett Ratner, the director, hadn’t made a film since 2017 when multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct and harassment.

He has since surfaced in the Epstein files.

Two-thirds of the crew who worked on Melania requested that their names not appear in the credits. Ratner told Variety:

I understand … working on the movie and they don’t want to be credited, but they want to feed their family. I don’t blame anybody for that.

The Denial-of-Service Attack

The $75 million didn’t just buy a bribe. The actual structure needs to be made more visible. It bought the elimination of an industry.

Budget denial. At the Sundance Film Festival last month, documentary filmmakers and producers discovered that Amazon wasn’t in the market to acquire or commission any documentaries.

Not one. According to IndieWire:

the company’s 2026 budget for nonfiction fare has been used in its entirety to produce and release Melania.

The largest buyer in the documentary market — the company that previously funded Time (mass incarceration), All In: The Fight for Democracy (Stacey Abrams), I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin), and Mayor Pete — spent everything on a single propaganda film and left nothing for the rest of the industry.

Screen occupation. All those 1,778 theaters were empty rooms. The screens are contractually unavailable for other programming during the release window. Australia proved organic demand is under $1,000 per screen. But the screens are occupied. This is bandwidth saturation, an infrastructure is full of nothing, so legitimate traffic can’t get through.

Workforce capture. The crew members who needed to eat took the job making propaganda they were ashamed of, then asked to have their names removed from the credits. Two-thirds of them. The people with the skills to make critical documentaries were employed making an infomercial. That’s labor denial as those workers can’t simultaneously be making something else.

Ecosystem collapse. The institutional destruction was timed to coincide:

• A24 shut its documentary department in May 2025.
• The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded by the Trump administration and Congress, taking PBS — “a cornerstone of the doc marketplace” — with it.
• Participant Media — the company that produced An Inconvenient Truth, RBG, Food, Inc., and dozens of other socially conscious documentaries — was closed by its founder Jeff Skoll. Skoll then hosted a Trump inauguration victory rally.
• Disney, Paramount, and Amazon all bid for Melania — three of the five major studios simultaneously signaling that what gets funded is fealty, not journalism.

Success narrative manufacture. GOP bulk purchases, paid attendees, and faith coalition email campaigns produce a $7 million number. Press runs it as a triumph. USA Today: “shocks at the box office.” CNBC: “a surprising $7 million.”

This creates the evidentiary basis for the argument that audiences want propaganda over journalism, which begs more of the same and less of everything else. The fake demand manufactures the rationale for killing real supply.

This is exactly how a distributed denial-of-service attack works. You flood the zone with shit until legitimate traffic can’t get through. The $75 million is shit traffic. The 1,778 screens showing to empty rooms are saturated bandwidth. And like a real DDoS, the attack looks like normal activity from the outside. Tickets were purchased. Screens were booked. A number was reported. The mechanism is invisible unless you examine the traffic and realize it’s synthetic attacks.

The Broader Media Acquisition

The Melania documentary is one transaction in a systematic buyout of the American information ecosystem.

The same week the film opened, Deadline reported that the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, a spinoff of Project 2025, had distributed a 47-page report called “Fedflix: Netflix, The Federal Government, and the New Propaganda State” to the White House counsel and the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee.

The report labels Netflix a company of “highly partisan Democratic operatives and donors” producing “FBI collaboration shows, hyper-sexualized LGBTQ+ children’s programs, and Russia hoax documentaries.” Its purpose is explicit: to provide the regulatory ammunition to block Netflix’s $83 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery so that Larry Ellison’s Paramount can take it instead.

The Oversight Project chief, Mike Howell, told Deadline:

I don’t want Netflix to get bigger at all. I want it to have less influence.

A GOP insider explained the mechanism:

Unlike the first term, conservative think tanks are quick to provide the administration with the ammunition they need to execute policy. That, Fox, and social media amplifies it and then the administration reacts. It’s a reflexive loop.

At the Melania premiere — standing in the theater Amazon paid for, at the screening of the $75 million bribery documentary — Trump told Deadline that Netflix acquiring Warner Bros “could be a problem” because of “monopoly.”

Paramount’s Chief Legal Officer is Makan Delrahim, who ran the DOJ Antitrust Division during Trump’s first term. The same antitrust apparatus that would review the Netflix deal is staffed by people now working for the rival bidder.

IndieWire noted that HBO and Netflix are the last two major platforms still funding social issue documentaries. HBO recently released The Alabama Solution (a prison system exposé) and has an Alex Gibney documentary about Elon Musk in the pipeline. If Ellison’s Paramount acquires Warner Bros instead of Netflix, HBO goes into the same portfolio as everything else — controlled by a family Trump calls “close friends.”

Map the full topology:

Platform	Status
Amazon	Captured. $75 million tribute paid. Documentary budget eliminated. NPR financially dependent.
Twitter/X	Captured. Musk ownership. Direct amplification platform for MAGA.
TikTok	Captured. Ellison purchase.
Paramount	Captured. Ellison ownership. Former Trump DOJ antitrust chief as legal officer.
Apple	CEO Tim Cook attended the White House Melania premiere. Signal sent.
A24	Documentary department shut down.
PBS/CPB	Defunded.
Participant Media	Closed. Founder switched sides.
Disney	Bid on Melania. Signal received.
Netflix and HBO/Warner Bros	Remaining targets. Heritage Foundation actively working to block their merger so Ellison can acquire WB instead.

Every platform that distributes narrative to the public is being either purchased, made financially dependent, or targeted for regulatory destruction. The outlets that still have editorial independence are subscription-funded or niche. The mass-reach platforms are being consolidated under oligarchic control operating in explicit coordination with state power.

The Press Release as News

NPR ran what amounted to an Amazon studio press release about the Melania opening. At the bottom of the article, after the audience had already absorbed the “exceeded expectations” narrative:

Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.

The disclosure was technically present. After the content. Where it functions as legal cover rather than editorial framing. The same pattern as a consent banner with 227 tracking partners: the mechanism of disclosure exists to provide the appearance of integrity while the actual information flow serves the opposite purpose.

USA Today ran it as “shocks at the box office” without mentioning GOP bulk purchases, paid attendees, international numbers, Ted Hope’s bribery characterization, the OGE director’s concerns, crew members removing their names, or Amazon’s budget elimination. The headline is the product. The documented evidence is the externality.

What the $7 Million Actually Measures

Box office exists to measure consumer demand. If the mechanism producing that number is political organizations bulk-buying empty seats, faith coalitions coordinating ticket campaigns, paid attendees on Craigslist, and GOP clubs struggling to give tickets away — then $7 million doesn’t measure demand. It measures how much political infrastructure was activated to manufacture the appearance of demand.

Comscore tracks transactions, not intent. It cannot distinguish a genuine moviegoer from a GOP club buying out a screening nobody attends, from an RNC-adjacent organization laundering political spending through ticket purchases. Empty theaters with purchased tickets don’t equal a successful film. It’s money laundering with extra steps.

The real number is the one from Australia. $982 per screen. That’s organic demand for this film: approximately nothing.

The Architecture of Absence

The $75 million didn’t buy an audience. It didn’t buy a good film — the director, the former Amazon film chief, the OGE director, and two-thirds of the crew all know that. It didn’t buy a commercial success — it will lose over $60 million by any honest accounting.

It bought three things:

1. A $28 million payment to the First Lady of the United States to influence her husband in regulatory decisions affecting Amazon’s core business.
2. The elimination of Amazon’s entire 2026 documentary budget, removing all documentaries by the largest buyer from the market at Sundance and beyond.
3. A manufactured success narrative that justifies the replacement of critical documentary filmmaking with mindless propaganda, creating the market conditions for more of the same.

The theaters aren’t empty by accident. The North Korean effect of empty roads, empty stands, empty lines, empty everything is the point.

Every screen occupied by Melania is a screen that can’t show the truth. Think of The Alabama Solution or an Alex Gibney investigation or anything else that confronts power. Every dollar Amazon spent on this film is a dollar that didn’t fund the next I Am Not Your Negro. Every crew member who took the job to feed their family and then stripped their name from the credits is a skilled professional who wasn’t making something that mattered.

The most dangerous power grabs in history sneak up as falsely legitimate. They fake receipts. They come with reports that say “exceeded expectations.” They come with press coverage and narrative that buries the conflict-of-interest. And they come with the systematic destruction of every institution that might produce the truth.

A guy worth over a hundred million, sitting posh in his fluffy London mansion, tells a Puerto Rican artist whose community is being called “animals” by government officials that he isn’t allowed to use 30 seconds at a microphone to say “we’re human”. That’s not a joke. That’s not comedy or even commentary. That’s an elitist bully punching down with a smirk to try and refocus attention on himself. It’s the petty jealousy of… Ricky Gervais.

He has built a second career out of telling other people not to do the things that he does constantly. The only coherent principle connecting such behavior is that his own causes apparently deserve all the platform, because he says other people don’t matter. As one of his followers put it:

So you can use your platform against cruelty to animals, but you draw the line on cruelty to people?

It’s not a principle at all, it’s just an old white guy with a big bruised ego riding a Netflix deal. To put it plainly, the man who loudly begs for credit as if he “confronts dogma that oppresses people”, in reality is the man yelling at oppressed people to shut TF up about their oppression.

His hypocrisy is damning, obviously, but he’s actually an even worse human than that. Plenty of people are hypocrites. It’s that he knows it and milks it too. He deleted an Emmys post after being called out for it, and then just reposted the same thing after the Grammys, telling others they don’t listen enough to him.

Principle? No.

After the 2025 Emmys, when Hannah Einbender said “fuck ICE,” Gervais came out storming her with criticism and then deleted it after backlash. His sudden repost now is the opposite to a spontaneous provocation, it’s him A/B testing his chances of reengagement. He knows his clip generates extremist hate group adoration (morally and financially bankrupt Gateway Pundit ran it immediately) and public outrage cycles. The deletion after the Emmys is how he’s been calibrating to help political extremists: not principled enough to leave it up as what he believes, not principled enough to stop doing it and accept accountability as an elitist white male ICE apologist.

He has also in this time systematically replaced creative output with divisive bait for controversy as his product. The SuperNature trans material, the Golden Globes recycling, the Grammy responses, and so forth aren’t comedy because they’re so obviously shallow engagement farming.

He is exactly the kind of disconnected celebrity that his entire 2020 monologue was ostensibly mocking. It’s like he wants to be as popular as Trump calling himself popular. The 2020 bit worked because it targeted everyone else who flew a private jet to accept their environmental awards. Recycling that against anyone condemning deportation operations affecting their own families and communities isn’t the same joke. It’s a totally different political act and the comedy mask falls right off.

“If you’re successful in showbiz you aren’t allowed to be political” flies like a lead balloon, especially from this Mr. Showbiz the Politician himself.

Gervais lives in a £14.5 million London mansion when he’s not hobnobbing in his $3.75 million Manhattan apartment. He earns over $100 million from old reruns alone. He claimed a single stand-up show at the Hollywood Bowl made him nearly $2 million. And he boasts of endorsement deals with Microsoft, Audi, and Pepsi.

And what does he do with all that wealth and insulation from humanity?

Politics.

The guy telling Americans they can’t complain about Kristi Noem, who notoriously executed her puppy, was the PETA Person of the Year (2013). He received the Humane Society’s Cecil Award (2018). He wrote letters to the UK government demanding fur import bans. He campaigned against Turkey’s stray animal law. Yet when Trump calls women and non-whites dogs, says their lives don’t matter, and sends his personal stormtroopers to publicly execute them, Gervais is the political mouthpiece who backs these killers.

Square that circle.

His “don’t be political” finger-wagging comes after he overtly campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 UK election. He very flagrantly used award shows, social media, Netflix specials, and every available media channel to push hard on his views on atheism, animal rights, hunting, veganism, and free speech.

His own stated philosophy for the past decade or more has been this:

Other celebrities try to use their voice to stop suffering. And Gervais suddenly jumps in front of them as if to say “you listen to me, these non-white people being called dogs and executed don’t get a voice, certainly not yours.”

So his position isn’t “celebrities shouldn’t use platforms for political speech.” His position is “celebrities shouldn’t use platforms for political speech I don’t care about.” When it’s fox hunting or Turkish dog culls, the platform is righteous. When it’s Bad Bunny saying his community isn’t animals, suddenly celebrities “know nothing about the real world.”

Bad Bunny, notably, is actually from the community being targeted. Shaboozey is a child of immigrants. Olivia Dean is a granddaughter of an immigrant. These aren’t Hollywood actors pontificating about supply chains in developing countries they visited once for a photo op. These are people with direct stakes in what they’re talking about.

Gervais delegitimizes non-white people’s speech about their own oppression. He gives his audience, and the right-wing media outlets that amplify his political rhetoric, a framework to dismiss what these artists said without engaging with it, while using his own platform to advocate for whatever he likes. That’s not an accident and it’s not ideologically neutral. His very selective pattern tracks along racial lines when it comes to immigration speech specifically.

His 2011 behavior perhaps predicted who we see now more clearly. He repeatedly tweeted a slur derived from “Mongoloid” — a term rooted in racial pseudoscience applied to people with Down syndrome — while posting photos of himself making mocking faces. Disability groups said the harm was comparable to a racial slur.

He was so indifferent to the origins and impact of the word that he used it casually for laughs, then dismissed critics as jealous of his wealth. Eventually he claimed to mothers of the children he was hurting that his detached and cruel mockery of them was “naïve” and therefore blameless.

…while he tries to avoid poking fun at disadvantaged people nowadays, he doesn’t regret his past. “You’re a product of your time, and you do make things for people of your time. I’d put trigger warnings on things, but I wouldn’t go back and change something,” he said. “Do I regret anything? No.

No regrets. Just following others.

He says he won’t do it again, while he leaves the harmful Tweets up literally doing it again and again now.

Or look at the summer of 2020. His response to the torture and public execution of George Floyd was to mock an “I Take Responsibility” anti-racism PSA by tweeting he was upset by “Terrible lack of diversity in this video.” That was it. No statement of his own. No support. No donation. No advocacy. He used the moment to ridicule those who speak out against racism, the identical move he’s doing now to shame protests against oppression.

This cynical playbook of provoke, defend, dismiss, half-concede all the way to the radical right-wing bank, is what he’s doing. He demands the entire platform so he can speak on behalf of dogs, and then uses it to silence the people being called dogs. It’s not a coincidence. Show me any evidence of anti-racism.

Deadly design defects of Tesla have been a theme on this blog for a decade already. Still no regulation in America? Apparently we just get lawsuits like this one.

This case is not an isolated incident. Last year, the California DMV found Tesla violated state law by using misleading terms like “Autopilot” and “full self-driving capability” in their marketing. Seattle University law professor Steve Tapia, who is not involved in the case, noted there have been similar lawsuits against Tesla nationwide.

Tapia also referenced a case involving a Florida jury’s decision last year to award more than $240 million in damages to victims of a deadly crash involving the Autopilot feature.

“When you see a pattern like this, and especially when it’s involving products, it’s hard to say that the manufacturer is not liable,” Tapia said. “And ultimately, none of this would be happening if it didn’t have the Autopilot feature, so in terms of root cause, it sort of seems to be a Tesla design problem.”

Autopilot is defective by design. Tesla should be liable.