It turns out for every buzzy political documentary of a first lady, there’s an equal and opposing force.
When Amazon MGM’s Brett Ratner-directed documentary Melania hit theaters over the Jan. 30-Feb. 1 weekend, it ultimately earned $7.1 million in its opening bow against its $40 million price tag and $35 million in additional marketing spend. More than 70 percent of its audience was female and 72 percent of all ticket buyers were septuagenarians as conservative grassroots groups hoped to send fans of the President to movie theaters to back the film.
While that effort had some success with the Fox News crowd, the MS NOW crew appears to have had other plans. Namely, they were watching Michelle Obama‘s 2020 documentary Becoming on Netflix. Viewership for the Obama doc rose more than 13,000 percent to 47.5 million minutes viewed of Becoming over the Jan. 30-Feb. 1 weekend, up from just 354,000 minutes viewed the weekend before, per data provider Luminate.
While it’s apples-and-oranges to compare box office grosses against streaming viewership, the dueling first lady docs are a decent snapshot of political polarization at the moment. Melania, which received a worldwide theatrical roll out but did not make box office provider Comscore’s top 10 global chart for the weekend, is expected to hit Prime Video with additional footage as a docuseries in the upcoming weeks (a release date hasn’t been set).
The feature premiered to a red carpet rollout for Trump administration officials and acolytes on Jan. 29 at the embattled Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Melania managed to earn a scathing 5 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from professional movie critics that watched the film, though audiences who went and saw the doc and were polled by theatrical tracker CinemaScore gave it an “A.” (That’s another indication that it’s Trump’s devoted base that went to see the movie in theaters.)
Becoming, produced by the Obamas’ Higher Ground Productions for Netflix, is partly based on the former first lady’s 2018 memoir of the same name that has sold more than 10 million books. The documentary, directed by Nadia Hallgren, was released in the COVID-19 lockdown era in May 2020 on Netflix, and follows Obama’s experiences while on tour for her memoir.
