Amazon’s Melania Ad Strategy Backfires In LA

January 31, 2026

The city of Los Angeles has rerouted buses that advertise Melania after vandals defaced movie posters and billboards promoting the controversial documentary.

Melania Trump
Melania TrumpChip Somodevilla/Getty Images

It’s not enough, it seems, that Melania, the newly released documentary about US First Lady Melania Trump, faces scathing reviews and a lukewarm style assessment. Now its unprecedented ad campaign is facing pushback, after billboards and posters for the Amazon-backed film have been defaced across Los Angeles.

The first movie from Brett Ratner since he was accused of sexual harassment and misconduct in 2017, Melania has enjoyed a level of attention that most documentarians can only dream of. The film following the wife of Donald Trump in the days leading up to his second inauguration has dominated headlines in the run up to its release Friday, a topic of understandable interest in these troubled times.

That interest has likely been stoked by the movie’s $35 million marketing budget (per the New York Times), which includes commercials aired during the NFL playoffs, billboards near busy thoroughfares, and — like Carrie Bradshaw in the Sex and the City credits — ads plastered across big city buses.

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A defaced billboard for Melania in Culver City, California.

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In Los Angeles, activist art collective INDECLINE has claimed credit for alterations to at least one billboard for the film, writing on social media that “we have gone to great lengths and risks to help create a little marketing buzz ahead of the premiere.” Above those words was a video of a masked vandal adding a scatological element to the billboard, a suggestion that the first lady — ad shown in the ad — is relieving herself on an American flag.

Other incidents of vandalism across the Los Angeles area include those on white-pasted posters and display advertising at bus stops, some of which now show Melania Trump in devil horns, a Hitler mustache, or with the words “deport” above the film’s title.

The defacements concerned city officials enough that Los Angeles Metro buses with Melania ads have been routed from some neighborhoods into other, presumably Melania-friendlier zones. “After seeing significant vandalism at city bus stops on advertising for the Melania movie, Metro proactively reassigned some of the buses containing that advertising to other geographic areas to minimize potential vandalism,” a spokesperson for the transit agency told NBC LA.

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A defaced bus stop advertisement for Melania in Exposition Park in Los Angeles.

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Speaking with the LA Times, Metro spokesperson Patrick Chandler elaborated. “Given that Metro buses have had significant vandalism and damage during previous periods of heightened public activity,” he said, “we made the decision in the interest of protecting our riders, employees and assets, and out of an abundance of caution, to shift some of these buses to areas where we were not observing that vandalism.” (Vanity Fair has reached out to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for more information on the reassignment, but has not received a response as of publication time.)

The reassigned buses are not expected to impact any riders’ commutes, and any disruption as a result of the change will end soon: According to the LAT, the campaign was a four-week ad buy, and we’re currently on week three. The film, which was released in around 1500 theaters across the US and Canada on Friday, is expected to eventually join the Amazon Prime Video streaming catalog. A date for its streaming drop has yet to be announced.