The new documentary film Melania, about First Lady Melania Trump, has received some pretty brutal criticism in the initial days after its release.
The film follows the first lady of the United States in the 20 days before her husband Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
In the first few days after its release, the film has been almost universally panned.
On Rotten Tomatoes, it has debuted with a shocking low score of just 10% at film critics website Rotten Tomatoes, while on another critics website, Metacritic, it has a score of 7 out of 100 based on 14 critics reviews, indicating “overwhelming dislike”.
Meanwhile, it has become one of the lowest rated films on IMDb (Internet Movie Database). At the time of writing, the doc currently has a score of 1.3/10, from over 22,000 votes.
A breakdown of the reviews show that 86.8% gave the film a score of 1/10.
According to Complex Pop Culture, the film at one point had a rating as low as 1.1/10, and Screenrant reports that the documentary broke the record for the “lowest-rated movie of all time” on IMDb.
Meanwhile on Letterboxd, a popular social platform for rating films, it currently has a 1.3 rating based on over 11,000 user votes.
“Melania will return in the Epstein files”, one reviewer wrote on the website, while another commented that “if they showed this on a plane, people would still walk out”.
The film earned $7m in the US, which was the strongest documentary debut in over a decade, The Guardian reported.
However, at $40m to make and $35m to promote, Melania cost quite more than a typical documentary.
At ticket sales were embarrassingly low for the film in the UK before its release.
Disney offered around $14 million, but lost to Amazon’s bid of $40 million to license the film and produce a follow-up docuseries on the first lady.
Netflix and Paramount Pictures also bid for the streaming rights for the documentary.
The film was beaten at the box office by two horror films: Iron Lung and Send Help, however it did beat the action film Shelter.
Melania is directed and produced by Brett Ratner, who is pictured cuddling a woman next to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, in the newly released Epstein files.
Ratner has not commented on his links to Epstein. Being named or pictured does not imply any wrongdoing.