Amazon Yanks ‘Melania’ Documentary from Theater After Mockery

Amazon has pulled its high-profile Melania documentary from a small Oregon theater after a tongue-in-cheek marquee mocking the film reportedly enraged studio executives.

The decision came after the Lake Theater & Cafe in Lake Oswego displayed cheeky messages promoting the documentary about First Lady Melania Trump. One sign read, “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out Friday!” Another quoted Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.”

According to multiple reports, the jokes did not land well with Amazon.

“We got a call that the higher-ups at Amazon were upset with how our marquee marketed their movie,” the theater wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “Per them, Sunday would be its last day here.”

The film is distributed by Amazon MGM Studios, which acquired the documentary in 2025 for a reported $40 million. The project was directed by Brett Ratner and follows the 20 days leading up to Melania Trump’s return to the White House during President Donald Trump’s second term.

The theater’s manager, Jordan Perry, said Amazon directly contacted the venue and demanded the film be pulled.

“The studio was not happy and did not appreciate my take on marketing their film to our own public,” Perry told The Oregonian.

Rather than backing down quietly, the theater doubled down.

After canceling all remaining screenings, the marquee was changed again. This time, it read: “Amazon called. Our marquee made them mad. All ‘Melania’ showings canceled. Show your support at Whole Foods instead.” Amazon owns Whole Foods.

Perry later explained that booking the documentary was never meant as a political statement—but as irony.

“It was a slow movie week,” he wrote in a blog post. “So why not show this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife?”

He added that the theater had been flooded with angry emails, voicemails, and negative online reviews questioning why the venue was screening the film at all. Some of those reviews were later removed by Google and Yelp.

Despite the controversy, Melania has been a commercial success. The documentary opened on nearly 1,800 screens nationwide and reportedly delivered the strongest box office performance for a documentary in more than a decade.

Amazon declined to comment on the decision to pull the film from the Oregon theater.

Perry, however, had one final jab.

“If you came to see Melania here and bought an $11 ticket, $5.50 of that went straight to Amazon,” he wrote. “We contributed $196 to the Jeff Bezos trust fund this week. Jeff Bezos won’t notice the money—but someone on his team definitely noticed our marquee.”

For one independent theater, a joke on a sign was enough to bring down the curtain.