Following the United States’ first lady and costing $40m, Melania may be one of the most expensive documentaries ever made. Here’s how it compares to other films of its type. While the United States reeled at the shooting of a civilian by ICE agents in Minnesota and shivered at a snow storm sweeping the country ... Melania cost $40m. Here’s how that budget compares to other documentary films
Following the United States’ first lady and costing $40m, Melania may be one of the most expensive documentaries ever made. Here’s how it compares to other films of its type.
While the United States reeled at the shooting of a civilian by ICE agents in Minnesota and shivered at a snow storm sweeping the country on the 24th January, a select group of elites filed into the White House to watch a movie.
Not just any movie, either: this was the premiere of Melania, a feature-length documentary about the first lady of the United States, Melania Trump. Directed by Brett Ratner, whose Hollywood career was previously sunk by multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, it’s said to follow Mrs Trump from the beginning of 2025 – just before her husband Donald Trump was inaugurated as US president for the second time – and tracks her movements and opinions over the course of just under three weeks.
In January 2025, days after Ratner started shooting his fly-on-the-wall film, came word that Amazon had made a $40m licencing deal for Melania – an extraordinary sum to pay for a non-fiction feature.
That deal was said to have been waved through at the urging of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy, and is reportedly only the start of the corporation’s huge investment in the documentary. According to Puck, Amazon is spending a further $35m on marketing and screening the film, both in US cinemas and 27 other countries.
Again, a documentary – a genre not known to generate billions at the box office – is being given the kind of marketing push you’d expect from a mid-tier Hollywood movie.
To get an idea of the sheer scale of that expenditure, it’s worth comparing Melania to some other documentaries (if we can actually call Melania a documentary – more on that shortly).
In 1973, Thames Television produced The World At War – a sprawling, 26-part documentary series narrated by Laurence Olivier. Tracking the rise of the Nazis and the global conflict that followed, it cost the current equivalent of $17.6m, or roughly £12.9m, when accounting for inflation. That figure made sense, however, given that its makers spent four years researching and conducting hundreds of interviews; the aim being to build a fair and accurate account of a war that killed millions.
Moving forward in time, we have the BBC’s Walking With Dinosaurs (1999), a six-part documentary series commissioned in the wake of Jurassic Park's box office success. The series cost a then-huge $9.9m (£6.1m) to make – largely because of the huge cost of its CGI and animatronic effects. With an average cost of £37,654 per minute of footage, the six-part series made the Guinness Book of Records for being the most expensive documentary series ever produced.
The budget for another natural history series, 2006’s Planet Earth, was even higher, with a reported cost of $25m. A feature-length spin-off, simply called Earth, had a budget of $47m – making it the most expensive documentary ever produced.
For comparison, here’s an at-a-glance list of high-profile documentaries and their budgets (again, adjusted for inflation):
Suggested product
Issue #60 Magazine Bundle (3x Covers: A Scanner Darkly Magazine + 1991 + Roger Deakins)
£14.99
Super Size Me (2004) | Budget: $110,000
Man On Wire (2008) | Budget: $1.6m
Triumph of The Will (1934) | Budget: $2.6m
Woodstock (1970) | Budget: $5.3m
Bowling For Columbine (1999)| Budget: $7.7m
March of The Penguins (2005) | Budget: $8m
Walking With Dinosaurs (1999 – 6 Episodes) | Budget: $9.9m
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) | Budget: $10m
This Is Cinerama (1952) | Budget: $12m
The World at War (1973 – 26 Episodes) | Budget: $17.6m
Planet Earth (2006 – 11 Episodes) | Budget: $25m
The Vietnam War (2017 – 10 Episodes) | Budget: $39.4m
Melania (2026) | Budget: Est. $40m
Earth (2007) | Budget: $47m
Earth's $47m, you may have noticed, is even more than Amazon paid for Melania. But the difference with Earth is that it took some five years and countless hours of travelling, filming and editing to create its vivid portrait of our planet and its delicate ecosystems.
Melania, on the other hand, was shot over the course of 20 days, with Brett Ratner staying at the Trumps’ luxury Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and following its subject around as she attends various official functions and generally lives a life of gilded luxury.
A trailer put out by Amazon MGM implied that Melania is an access-all-areas study of the president’s wife, an ex-model from the former Yugoslavia. Behind the scenes, however, it was far from a typical documentary. Melania Trump is one of its co-producers, and according to her agent Marc Beckman, she’s been unusually hands-on in its production.
“She knows what to do with lighting,” Beckman told The Mirror. “She was directing the crew on set as to where to place the cameras. She gets involved in the edits, the colour correction and the music selection.”
Ratner also appears to have a close association with Beckman and the Trumps. According to the LA Times, Ratner was hired by Beckman’s advertising agency to shoot a jeans commercial in 2007. It was Beckman who recommended Ratner to Melania Trump; Beckman later described Ratner as “one of the most talented directors of our lifetime.”
The filmmaker’s high-rolling lifestyle and successful production company, RatPac, has given him connections to some wealthy and powerful people, including the likes of Steven Mnuchin, Arthur Sarkissian and the late sex trafficker and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – all of whom have prior history with Donald Trump. These connections appeared to come in useful when multiple allegations of rape and inappropriate behaviour effectively ended Ratner’s career in 2017. (Ratner has denied those allegations.)
As well as the Melania film and a related three-part TV show, Ratner’s due to make the action sequel Rush Hour 4 this year. That film was said to have been willed into existence at the behest of Donald Trump himself, with the US president reported to have personally insisted to Paramount that it revive the dormant franchise, starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. (Another connection between the current president and Ratner: the director’s 2011 action comedy Tower Heist was shot at Trump International Hotel and Tower, and was originally named Trump Heist.)
All of which might beg the question: why would Amazon pay around $75m for a soft-focus vanity project about Donald Trump’s wife? Puck estimates that it may make $5m in cinemas; even if Melania wildly exceeds expectations, it’s still almost certain to lose the corporation millions.
Then again, Amazon’s bosses are among a number of billionaires who’ve tried to win the US president’s approval through financial donations and other means.
As the New York Times recently put it, the firm’s $40m purchase is far more than it would typically pay for a documentary, but then, Jeff Bezos “has many reasons to curry favour with the administration, including antitrust regulation, Amazon’s defense contracts and his space company’s federal contracts.”
That $75m is likely to be written off as a small price to pay if it means that those ongoing contracts, worth billions, are secured even temporarily. Paramount recently agreed to pay $16m to president Trump to assuage his anger over the editing of an interview with Kamala Harris on CBS, one of the studio’s TV channels. Legal experts said that there was no merit to Trump’s case; Paramount handed over the cash regardless. Weeks later, the studio’s $8bn merger deal with Skydance was waved through by the Federal Communications Commission.
When word got around last year that a Melania Trump documentary was in the offing, produced through its subject’s own company, Muse Films, Paramount and Disney both put in offers, but neither matched Amazon’s $40m bid. The New York Times reports that the Trumps would have personally made $28m from that deal – a small sliver of the estimated $1.4bn he and his family have accumulated from their various business ventures since the inauguration in 2025.
Melania Trump has herself launched lines of jewellery and cryptocurrencies and skincare products, and is said to have amassed a fortune worth $70m. The new documentary is merely the latest extension to her growing brand; as Beckman told The Mirror, “Melania’s vision is very symmetrical, right angles, black and white. It’s all about supporting this luxury brand that she’s building.”
So it was that, on the 24th January, some of the wealthiest people on the planet gathered at the White House to watch a private screening of Melania. Among them were Apple’s boss, Tim Cook, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD and Amazon head honcho Andy Jassy.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, guests at the glitzy event were handed servings of popcorn in expensive-looking boxes, cookies decorated with Mrs Trump’s name, framed tickets and copies of her book.
With the US teetering on the brink of political and social chaos, the event was widely criticised for its timing. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on social media, “Today DHS assassinated a VA nurse in the street, Bondi is attempting to extort voter files, and half the country is bracing on the eve of a potentially crippling ice storm with FEMA gutted. So what is the President up to? Having a movie night at the White House.”
Among the other guests of honour at the White House that weekend was Brett Ratner himself, who attended the black tie event with his mother. Once shunned by Hollywood, the disgraced filmmaker now appears to owe the current leg of his career to the most powerful family on the planet.
/**/
