Amazon Prime Video picks up Melania Trump documentary set for release later this year
Amazon Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump that is set to be released later this year, an Amazon MGM Studios spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.
In a statement, the spokesperson said the documentary began filming last month. The project lists both Melania Trump and Fernando Sulichin as executive producers. Brett Ratner will direct the film — he is a co-owner of RatPac Entertainment, which was once associated with former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
“We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” the Amazon spokesperson added.
The announcement comes just months after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, and just two weeks before the couple is set to return to the White House for a second term.
The relationship between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ businesses and Trump has come under scrutiny in recent weeks due to a perceived new coziness between the two men.
Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 but still serves as the company’s executive chairman. The billionaire also owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace company.
During Trump’s first term, there were a number of high-profile clashes between the then-president and Bezos or his companies.
For example, in a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged Trump launched “behind-the-scenes attacks” against the company. The company claimed that public and private attacks from the then-president led it to lose out on a major cloud services contract for Amazon Web Services.
Last week, a cartoonist at the Post, Ann Telnaes, shared publicly that she quit her job at the newspaper after she was blocked from publishing a satirical cartoon about tech CEOs, including Bezos, kneeling before the president-elect.
The other CEOs in the cartoon, Telnaes said, included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and others have each pledged to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration committee.
Washington Post editorial page editor David Shipley pushed back on the notion that Telnaes’ cartoon was canned because of Bezos.
In a statement to CNBC, Shipley said, “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Telnaes’ revelation came just months after Post readers and current and former staff criticized the paper for announcing that it would no longer endorse presidential candidates.
In their own reporting, Post journalists wrote that the publication’s editorial board had decided to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The same article reported that Bezos himself made the decision to stop endorsing candidates.
In a piece published days later on the newspaper’s website, Bezos wrote, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Bezos did not immediately respond to an NBC News request for comment about whether he was at all involved with securing the licensing for the forthcoming Melania Trump documentary.
