President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for a New Year’s Eve bash at his Mar-a-Lago home on the final day of 2025. Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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Yesterday I published a story about what was quickly becoming a surprising site of capital R Resistance: the Letterboxd review page for the $75 million documentary film, Melania.
Comments were profane, fun, silly, unprintable. I included some of my favorites. The point I was making was this: Even before the movie’s release this Friday, it has become a lightning rod for anger, not least because Melania Trump’s oligarchic private premiere gala at the White House came the same day Alex Pretti was shot dead in the streets of Minneapolis amid her husband’s disastrous siege of the city. A real let-them-eat-cake moment.
But as my colleague Arianna Coghill went to promote the story today on our social media channels, she discovered the reviews have been wiped from the site entirely.
Wiped clean.
Sad.
So I sent an email to the Letterboxd press team asking why. What terms were violated? When did that happen? Even though the reviews appeared before the official release of the film, how is Letterboxd to know reviewers hadn’t seen the film itself?
They haven’t gotten back to me, and I’ll share their response when they do.
Update, Tuesday, January 27, 5:45 p.m.: Letterboxd just got back to me (they are based in New Zealand), attributing the erasure to an innocuous, automated back-end update:
This was an automatic update, caused by a previously incorrect premiere date. Letterboxd pulls through film data from TMDB, a user editable database for movies. The official premiere date was corrected on TMDB, automatically updated on the film’s main page on Letterboxd, thus preventing all reviews from appearing on the film page until its premiere. This happens from time to time on film pages through the automated sync, with no manual intervention required from the Letterboxd team.
So there you have it. Friday’s official release of the Amazon-MGM doc will provide would-be reviewers a fresh opportunity to contribute to Letterboxd’s thriving message boards.
Here’s what I had previously pointed out about the site’s publicly available rules and regulations:
Letterboxd’s Terms of Service prohibit using the site to “game the Service’s mechanics,” “alter consensus,” or “participate in orchestrated attacks against films or filmmakers.” Letterboxd also asserts the “absolute discretion” to remove any post. Any account can be suspended for “any reason or no reason whatsoever, with or without notice.”
Letterboxd is also pretty clear in its FAQ: “Letterboxd is for reviews of films you’ve seen, not those you want to see,” and it encourages people to flag “pre-release reviews,” which, it says, “we’ll remove at our discretion.” It also says its undisclosed platform magic helps ensure its ratings are less vulnerable to being abused in online campaigns “to accurately represent the global consensus for each film”—but says people are welcome to report those suspected of waging such a campaign.
I guess we’ll have to wait until Friday, when the “global consensus” will begin to take shape—I suspect somewhat quickly.
Meanwhile, as if pocketing $28 million for just 20 days of being followed by filmmakers wasn’t grifty enough, Melania went on Fox News this morning to sermonize about “unity” after the Pretti killing—beneath a banner promoting her new film, bearing her own name.
Subtle.
.@FLOTUS: “We need to unify. I’m calling for unity. I know my husband, the President, had a great call yesterday with the Governor and the Mayor… If you protest, protest in peace. We need to unify in these times.” ❤️ pic.twitter.com/oj3skxpAYf
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 27, 2026
