A Lake Oswego movie theater, outside Portland, had the Melania doc pulled after the theater owner put something on the marquee that may have angered Jeff Bezos and Amazon Studios, the film’s backer.
According to The Oregonian, the Lake Theater & Cafe wrote on its marquee, in advance of showing the film, “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.” The theater later wrote on Instagram, “Got a call that the higher-ups (i.e., at Amazon) were upset with how our marquee marketed their movie (i.e., Melania), that, per them, Sunday would be its last day here.”
The post added that before that, the theater also received “countless emails and voicemails and Google / Yelp reviews (Google / Yelp took them down) wondering why the hell we had Melania here,” or otherwise disparaging the FLOTUS.
“Now that it’s prematurely over,” the post continued, meaning the scheduled Melania screenings at the theater, “the plug pulled on us not from public outcry (always listening, thank you) but by some corporate executive (fair enough, sorry AMZN, please don’t cancel my Prime), Jordan” — Perry, the theater manager — “figured he’d …say something?”
Perry: “Why not get this inexplicable vanity piece?”
As the Instagram post mentioned, Perry later added in a blog post on the theater’s site, ” … So, to fill a screen, why not get this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife?” explaining his rationale for booking the movie in the first place. Perry continued, “I mean, it just seems so weird that it even exists (who wants a movie about Melania lol?), and wouldn’t it then be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show it here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighborhood cinema?”
After Amazon nixed the scheduled screenings, Lake Theater wrote on its marquee, “Our marquee made them mad,” and that the Melania screenings were canceled. “Show your support at Whole Foods instead,” the sign said.
Meanwhile, Lake Theater has put snarky non-political messages on its marquee before. For example, referring to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour film, the sign said, “Not getting the Taylor Swift movie because her music’s not even good.”
Amazon is not likely to cover costs
Not a single ticket sold for the opening night of Melania at Boston’s largest theater pic.twitter.com/yFDpSerUKb
— Nate Gilbert (@NateGilbert) January 27, 2026
Outside of Oregon, the Melania documentary has produced unusually polarized results at the box office and with critics. In the United States, the film opened to an estimated $7 million in its first weekend, marking one of the strongest openings for a non-music documentary in over a decade, and finishing third overall among new releases behind a comedy and a horror title.
Despite this initial turnout, industry observers note that with Amazon reportedly spending around $40 million to acquire the film and another roughly $35 million on marketing, the theatrical gross alone is unlikely to cover costs.
Critically, Melania has been widely panned — holding very low scores on review aggregators and described by some reviewers as shallow or propagandistic — even as some audience polling shows a high CinemaScore grade. Internationally, turnout has been much softer, with low per-screen totals in markets such as Australia.
