They started arriving shortly after sundown. Wave after wave of black SUVs rolling up to the waterfront entrance of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., unloading a guest list that looked less like a movie debut and more like a MAGA cabinet meeting. Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Marco Rubio, Sean Duffy, Dr. Phil, Jeanine Pirro — also, incongruously, Nicki Minaj, rapper Waka Flocka Flame and enough couture designers to stage a coup at Paris Fashion Week — all dutifully turned out for what was being billed as the cinematic event of the Trump era: the Jan. 29 premiere of Melania, the first lady’s $75 million Amazon documentary.

“It really brings back a glamour that you just don’t see anymore,” the President said to reporters in praise of his wife’s film before the curtain was raised. “Our country can use a little bit of that, right?”

It could use a bit of something. Because pretty much everywhere else but the Kennedy Center on this frigid winter night, the country was more focused on fury than finery. Since the Jan. 24 shooting by ICE agents of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti — and a few weeks earlier, 37-year-old mother of three Renee Good — outraged crowds have been protesting not just in Minneapolis, but all over. Even here, at the premiere, scores of demonstrators, herded behind police barricades and security fencing, were waving signs and shouting at attendees.

 “They ruin everything,” one guest groused about the protestors to her date on the red carpet (actually, black and white, Melania’s current signature color scheme), before quickly sashaying into the theater.

There’s a lot to note about the first lady’s flashy, fashion-forward new film. Like the fact that it may well be the most expensive documentary ever shown in theaters. That it’s being quietly promoted with a political-campaign-like grassroots marketing blitz fueled by MAGA groups including Turning Point and Log Cabin Republicans. That it’s clearly intended as the prelude to a whole new chapter in Melania Trump’s public posture, positioning her as a lifestyle brand all her own, the red state answer to Martha Stewart. And that it’s directed by Brett Ratner, the Rush Hour director whose career has been sidelined since multiple sexual misconduct allegations in 2017 — and who tells The Hollywood Reporter, in his first on-the-record interview about the film, that he “was literally a fly on the wall.”

It’s not hard to guess why Ratner would jump at the project. But he emphatically denies his motives in shooting the film had anything to do with a hoped-for Hollywood comeback. “That’s ridiculous,” he says. “If anything, this was a bigger risk because of the polarization and subject matter. I didn’t do this to get me back into Hollywood. That wasn’t my strategy. I’ve been waiting to make Rush Hour 4 — that was my strategy.”

But right now, as guests ignore the shouting protesters as they stream into the Kennedy Center, one thing stands out above the rest. Its timing couldn’t be worse.

Of course, Melania is hardly the first first lady to invite cameras into her home for a documentary. It’s a tradition that goes back to Jackie Kennedy, who famously gave CBS’ Charles Collingwood a televised tour of the White House in 1962. Pat Nixon, Nancy Reagan, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama — they all appeared in documentaries while they were still in office.

“I believe the Americans and people all over the world should witness the incredible amount of planning and work required when shifting from private citizen to first lady,” Melania explains of why she made the movie in an email that she — or someone on her staff — sent to THR in response to a series of questions. “I take pride in every detail.”

Still, it’s safe to say that none of Melania’s predecessors ever presented themselves in quite the way the current first lady is about to present herself. According to eyewitnesses at the premiere, the film, which follows Melania during the 20-day run-up to her husband’s second inaugural, plays like a hyperstylized, big-budget episode of Real Housewives of Palm Beach, with Melania’s wardrobe — a carousel of coats, hats and sunglasses — practically a supporting cast all its own. Everything from the length of the hem on her inaugural gown to her discussions with her interior designer about redecorating the White House to her chat with French first lady Brigitte Macron about online bullying is captured by Ratner’s cameras with the high gloss sheen of a Jean-Baptiste Mondino music video.

“She had a theatrical, big-screen vision for the film right from the start,” Ratner says of the aesthetic inspiration for the movie during a phone call just hours before attending the premiere (where he sat in the audience with his mom, right next to the first lady’s father, Viktor Knavs, who makes many — mostly silent — appearances in her movie). “Melania didn’t want a documentary. She didn’t want talking heads. She said, ‘Brett, don’t hold back.’ ”

There’s some dispute about how the movie was originally pitched. Early press accounts report that Melania herself proposed the idea to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in late 2024. But the first lady’s senior advisor and manager for the past 25 years, Marc Beckman, says that’s not true, that she pitched it directly to him shortly after the 2024 election during one of their many brainstorming phone calls, and that he was the one who shopped the idea around Hollywood, ultimately landing its eyebrow-raising $40 million licensing deal with Amazon. He claims multiple studios were interested — including Disney and Paramount — offering deals “in the same ballpark” as Amazon, denying reports that Paramount and Disney ponied up polite lowball offers never intended to be taken seriously.

“People are saying it’s the richest documentary in history, which is a nice feather in my cap because I negotiated it,” he says, noting that the deal also includes at least two episodes’ worth of bonus material that will stream along with the doc when it eventually migrates from theaters onto Prime. “But if you really think about the upside for Amazon, it’s a fair deal. It’s very much fair market value.”

It sure must have put a smile on Melania’s face — and pleased her husband as well. She’s reportedly pocketing $28 million of the $40 million licensing fee, with the rest presumably used to bankroll the film’s production costs. That may well have been why Bezos, who has extensive business interests with the federal government, including his space company Blue Origin and Amazon’s cloud computing contracts, decided to write the check in the first place. Compared to some of the other attempts at purchasing the president’s good will over the past year — like that $400 million jet the Qatari royal family gave him last May — a documentary is dirt cheap. It’s certainly a more thoughtful gift than that 24-karat glass-and-gold paperweight Apple CEO Tim Cook gave to Trump back in August.

The Amazon deal appears to have been sealed, or at least discussed, in Washington. Still, not everybody at the streamer was thrilled with the project, and not just because of the political optics. There were also reservations about working with Ratner, who for much of the past decade has remained unemployable in Hollywood after multiple women — including actresses Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge — publicly accused him of sexual misconduct and harassment, charges he has vehemently denied. Sources say other directors were discussed — including several female filmmakers — but Beckman pushed for Ratner. The two had worked together back in 2007, when Beckman ran an advertising agency in New York — handling campaigns for Gucci, Barneys New York, L’Oréal and others — and had hired Ratner to shoot a Jordache jeans ad with Heidi Klum at the Chateau Marmont.

“What he showed me during that time was that he understood a high-end aesthetic,” Beckman says. “He could do something that was more stylized, that had a luxury feel to it.”

Ratner says he was caught totally by surprise when, nearly 20 years after the Jordache job, he heard from Beckman again. “I was in my apartment in Miami Beach, and I got a call,” he says. “Marc asked me a bunch of questions and at the end of the call said, ‘Would you like to go up to Mar-a-Lago and meet the first lady?’ I didn’t even ask how they came up with my name. I mean, I know the first lady likes my movies …”

That meeting obviously went well, and while Melania never raised any questions about Ratner’s reputation, he answered them anyway. “I said to her, ‘I’m a controversial figure. And if we do this film, we’re going to be tied together for the rest of our lives.’ And she had no issue with it.”

As it happens, in November 2025, three months after David Ellison, son of Trump ally Larry Ellison, took over Paramount, Ratner signed a deal with that studio to finally make another sequel to his buddy-cop comedy franchise. Back in late 2024, though, he says he just wanted to get behind a camera again, even if a documentary was his only chance to do so. “I did this because making films is just something I love to do,” he says. “That’s what I’m born to do. If someone asked me to shoot their kid’s bar mitzvah, I would probably film it.”

Within weeks Ratner was ensconced in an eight-bedroom house on the Mar-a-Lago estate, where he would spend the next two months filming his slick, hyperstylized movie about the mysterious Mrs. Trump. For an action director who’d never dabbled in nonfiction cinema before, the learning curve was steep. “It was probably the hardest film I ever made,” he says. “I was there from the moment she woke up to the moment she went to bed. And it was all improv. We couldn’t stop anything — we couldn’t say, ‘Let’s do that again.’ It was all happening in real time. I’m used to yelling ‘Cut,’ but there was no cut.”

There was also the challenge of working with a star whose command of the English language has never been fully clear. Luckily, Ratner had some experience with difficult communication on the set. “I understand broken English,” he insists. “I’ve made movies with Chris Tucker.”

For a documentary, Melania was a frenetic production, filming in multiple locations as the first lady jetted around the country, with as many as 80 crewmembers involved in shooting some scenes — not counting Secret Service agents (“They hated me — I was always in the way,” Ratner says). The core crew included some heavy hitters, like star cinematographers Dante Spinotti (Michael Mann’s main cameraman), Jeff Cronenweth (David Fincher’s favorite shooter) and Barry Peterson (who shot It Ends with Us), as well as Oliver Stone’s frequent film editor Alex Márquez. But there have been reports that it was not a particularly happy set.

Rolling Stone reports that several crewmembers on the film — who obviously signed up before the bedlam of Trump’s second term had begun — now regret having worked on the movie and have requested that their names be pulled from the credits. Some also complained about long hours, disorganization on the set and the director’s personal sloppiness, leaving a trail of orange peels and gum wrappers everywhere he went (interestingly, at least some on the crew seemed to like Melania — “totally nice,” one described her).

“I don’t blame anybody,” Ratner says of the pulled screen credits, noting that none of his core crew requested their names be cut. “I understand it completely. Everybody has to make their own decisions. This is a very polarized time, and people have families and careers and reputations to think about.”

There actually is a universe in which Melania could turn out to click at the box office— or at least not bomb.

At this writing, National Research Group forecasts an opening in the $5 million range, among the highest for any doc over the last 10 years. And it’s at least theoretically possible that those numbers might be underestimating it. Amazon is spending heavily on marketing — even as the company shed 16,000 workers just days before the film’s release — possibly because Prime Video exec Mike Hopkins, the guy who ultimately decides marketing budgets for the streamer’s films, is known to lean conservative. Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy is also said to be firmly behind the doc.

Exact dollar amounts aren’t available, but sources say that the $35 million marketing figure that’s been floating around the press is indeed real, with about half of that being spent in the U.S. That’s enough to afford all those ads on Fox News — and a few on CNN, too — as well as those pricey NFL spots, which go for as much as a million dollars. Not to mention an endless supply of bus-stop posters in major cities across America — which keep getting defaced and replaced.

More interesting than the ad spends, though, is the grassroots marketing campaign being directed by Melania’s own staff out of the first lady’s Mar-a-Lago and New York headquarters. One example: At precisely the same time Melania was premiering at the Kennedy Center, 20 other invitation-only screenings were taking place in strategically picked cities across the country, all part of an orchestrated, clockwork scheme to build buzz and word of mouth. Her team has also activated Melania’s network of supporters — yes, she has some, including Erika Kirk, who’s now running Turning Point USA, and the gay-conservative group Log Cabin Republicans — to turn out their bases at the ticket booth as a show of support.

Judging from a totally unscientific survey of movie theater seat maps, there are places where the campaign shows tentative signs of working — at least here in the U.S. Maps in conservative hubs like El Plano, Texas, indicate that theaters there are nearly sold out. Even movie-goers in some bright blue spots are showing weird interest in the film; Lincoln Square 13, located in the indigo-blue heart of Manhattan’s upper westside, has sold about half its seats for Jan. 30’s 6:45 p.m. showing. 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?

Overseas, it’s a very different picture. The film doesn’t appear to be selling more than a handful of tickets in the U.K., and it’s been pulled out of theaters altogether in South Africa, with its local distributor, Filmfinity, blaming its change of heart on “recent developments” and “the current climate.” Presumably the movie will do better in Dubai.

Still, with a $75 million total price tag, it’s highly unlikely the film will make back much of that money in theaters. For Amazon, though, box office numbers are only part of the play. Although a theatrical release was one of the main reasons the first lady says she signed with Amazon — “This was critical to me,” she notes in one of her emailed answers — Amazon may see more upside once the movie starts streaming on Prime. The company has had some success in luring red-state subscribers with shows like Reacher and Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan. They likely look at Melania as potential MAGA bait.

To be fair, it is possible that there exists in the wider movie-going public some genuine, organic interest in a Melania documentary. Those seat maps in Lincoln Center may really be filled with eager single-ticket-buying Melania fans. Or at least curious ones.

After all, she remains arguably the most mysterious first lady in American history. Where does she live? How does she think? How does she truly feel about her husband? And, while we’re at it, what’s with the black and white color scheme at the premiere? (Unlike the president, she’s said to loathe the color gold.)

Some of those questions may well be answered in her new documentary. Sadly, they won’t be answered in interviews with magazine journalists. THR submitted a list of questions to the first lady and was sent back polite, carefully worded and markedly articulate answers that, frankly, read like they might have been workshopped with the help of ChatGPT — or maybe Grok.

Asked about her husband’s input in the movie, she writes, “He’s a natural star, and his star shines very bright in this film.” Asked which former first ladies she most admires? “Today’s world is very different and requires a modern approach. America’s First Lady’s [sic] have always played an important role for our country, and they were all unique during their respective time period.” Asked why she picked Ratner to direct? “Brett is a highly talented director with a tremendous eye for beauty and a great sense of how to connect emotionally with audiences all over the world.”

But, of course, schmoozing with the press has never been part of Melania’s comfort zone — and maybe with good reason. The media has not always been kind to her. That undoubtably explains why, for most of her marriage to Trump, she has mostly remained behind the scenes, intensely private, wary of unfiltered attention. But that’s precisely what makes Melania such a curious development, the first time in either of her husband’s presidencies that the first lady has planted herself so directly in the spotlight.

And it looks like there’s more Melania to come, with a pivot to a much more front-facing public life. Not as a political or media figure — her own ideological preferences remain as enigmatic as her personality — but as a branding opportunity. Aside from whatever other content Melania ends up producing through her newly formed Muse Films production company‚ she’s also trying to turn herself into an Oprah Winfrey-style lifestyle and luxury marketing hub. She’s already taken steps in this direction, peddling jewelry, books, even Christmas ornaments (which, according to Beckman, oddly sell better in blue cities than in red), so why not go bigger with her own line of fragrances, houseewares and skin-care products? With a hit movie under her Hervé Pierre belt, the sky’s the limit.

As she said before the Kennedy Center premiere, during a bell-ringing appearance at the New York Stock Exchange, “Superior storytelling drives culture and in turn moves markets.”

If, on the other hand, the movie flops, Jeff Bezos better start looking into $400 million airliners.

Pamela McClintock, Alex Weprin and Borys Kit contributed to this report.

A version of this story appeared in the Jan. 29 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.