Military Forced to See ‘Melania’ Against Their Will

A watchdog group says thousands of active-duty troops were quietly nudged, pressured, or flat-out told to go see Melania — Amazon’s $75 million glossy documentary about the first lady that’s tanking with critics but pulling surprisingly high ticket sales.

The film opened with just $7 million at the box office, even after a massive marketing blitz — and now the Military Religious Freedom Foundation says it knows why. According to its president, Mikey Weinstein, service members from eight military facilities wrote in saying their commanders strongly “encouraged” them to hit the theater.

Weinstein said troops were blunt in their messages: nobody wanted to go, but nobody wanted to get in trouble either. “Your military superior isn’t your shift manager at Taco Bell,” Weinstein told Business Insider. “They have complete and total control over you.”

One letter described a commander who allegedly wears MAGA hats, swats down anyone who isn’t on board with the administration, and even counted Melania as one of the mandatory “unit activity events” that service members must attend every month. For a documentary, that’s… not standard.

Another troop wrote, “When he said ‘advised,’ we knew exactly what that meant. We feel helpless to fight this.”

Photos from the premiere show President Donald Trump and the first lady celebrating the film at the Kennedy Center. The documentary follows her final days before returning to the White House — a glossy, tightly controlled portrait directed by Brett Ratner.

Amazon reportedly paid $40 million just for Melania’s image rights and dropped another $35 million on marketing. Insiders say she could personally take home around $27 million from the deal, prompting critics to accuse Amazon boss Jeff Bezos of trying to stay on the Trump family’s good side as the company faces billions in losses from new tariffs.

Ratner, whose career cratered after sexual misconduct allegations in 2017, denies the documentary is a giant political bribe. But two-thirds of the crew allegedly asked for their names to be removed from the credits — a detail raising even more eyebrows.

The Department of Defense insists there’s no official order forcing troops to see the movie, adding in its statement that the film is “fantastic.” But Weinstein says using military pressure for ideology-driven outings is dangerous: “It tears down unit cohesion. It’s like injecting cancer into the body of a military unit.”

Meanwhile, theaters overseas are barely selling tickets — one major London cinema says it only sold one.

Whether Melania becomes a cult curiosity or a political flashpoint, one thing’s clear: the drama behind the scenes may be more gripping than anything Ratner put on screen.