Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
He told Business Insider. “They were pressured to see the movie. Your military superior, that’s not your shift manager at Taco Bell or Starbucks. They have complete and total control over you.”
The MRFF, a non-profit founded in 2005 to promote the separation of church and state within the military, has roughly 100,000 members.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
The unit commander in question is alleged to have worn red MAGA hats in the past and “made it very clear” how he feels about those who do not support the administration’s agenda.
He is also alleged to have made seeing Melania count as one of the three “unit activity events” service members are required to attend each month. Such events are designed to promote bonds within combat units and their families.
The letter said, “…he ‘advised’ our unit members and their families to join him and his wife and children for a showing of that new documentary called ‘Melania’ at an off-base movie theater… When he said ‘advised’, we know what that meant.
“We feel helpless to try to fight against what he is doing here.”
Weinstein said that manipulating troops to spend their leisure time on ideologically driven activities negatively affects unit cohesion.
“It tears it down,” he said. “It’s like injecting cancer into the body of the military unit.”
In a statement to the Daily Beast, the Department of Defense said that there “is no Department of War [sic] directive requiring service members to see this film, though the film is fantastic.”
Trump has given the Department of Defense the secondary title “department of war,” but cannot legally rename it.
Amazon’s extraordinary expenditure on the 100-minute film has made it one of the most expensive documentaries of all time.
$35 million was spent on marketing alone, while $40 million was handed to Melania Trump’s production company for the “rights” to use her image and likeness in the film.
Melania herself is expected to personally pocket $27 million from the Amazon deal, sparking claims that the entire project is, in fact, a massive bribe paid by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos to curry favor with the Trump family.
With increased tariffs on Chinese goods, Amazon is facing potential $6.5 billion in operating losses from Trump’s trade war with the Asian giant.
The film’s director, Brett Ratner, has denied that the film is a bribe, claiming that “three of the best cinematographers in the world” worked on it. It has been reported that two-thirds of the people who worked on the film asked for their names to be removed from the credits.
The movie is Ratner’s first major project since being accused by several women of sexual assault in 2017. He also appears in images released as part of the Epstein files. The Rush Hour director has denied the claims and said he “didn’t know” the late sex-trafficking financier. But he did admit he was in a photograph with Epstein and told YouTuber Piers Morgan that the woman was his fiancée, whom he then said he could not name.
