Melania, Brett Ratner’s authorised documentary about the current US first lady, has opened at No 29 in the UK box office chart on its first weekend of release. The film, which cost Amazon $40m to buy and $35m to promote, screened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland, taking £32,974 overall, with a site average of £212.80.
This result will have the distributors breathing a sigh of relief as – despite the modest takings – this is far from the disaster many anticipated. The scale of the rollout was unprecedented in the UK documentary sector, where most titles are capped at around 25 locations.
Melania’s take is just shy of the £33,000 achieved by Prime Minister – the recent documentary about the former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern – over its first weekend of release. That film was out on 28 UK screens (18% of Melania’s rollout total) making a site average of £1,178.57 (more than five times greater than Melania).
While many screenings of Melania were either empty or very sparsely attended, some were sold out. The early afternoon showing at the Vue Islington in London, for instance, had to turn away prospective punters, who were nearly all journalists.
Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet topped the UK box office on its fourth weekend of release, making £1,412,612 across 737 locations for a site average of £1,917. This was just a ticket or two above The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s erotic thriller, which took £1,399,262 on its sixth week of release, across 596 locations for a £2,348 site average.
The top five was rounded out by two other new releases – Shelter (£946,903) and Iron Lung (£948,731) – and Zootropolis 2, which took £855,208 on its 10th week of release.
Further chart information is currently unavailable from tracking and analytics company Comscore, but a representative did add that Melania was the ninth best performing new release of the week. Twelve new titles were out in the UK last Friday, including Bollywood releases Mardaani 3 and Gandhi Talks, which are both out in a limited number of screens.
While international box office is yet to report, the film has defied its dire expectations in the US, entering the charts at No 3 and taking $7m. In order to break even, Ratner’s film will need to take around $100m globally.
The film is currently scoring 10% on reviews aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and has seven out of 100 on Metacritic. Meanwhile it currently has a rating of 1.3/10 from over 22,000 votes on the Internet Movie Database, as well as the same score on social media reviewing site Letterboxd. This is a rise from the 1.0 it hit earlier on the weekend on IMDb, making it their lowest-rated movie of all time.
