I didn’t set out to post anything about Melania (see screen capture of the top portion of its film poster) because the less said about the Trumps’ personal and business lives the better. But when I read online about how poorly Melania is doing at the box office, I turned to a website I trust—IMDb.com—for more information. As of today, the film’s rating there is the lowest I have ever seen.
Melania is a documentary about first lady Melania Trump’s life and her relationship with President Trump. The focus is on the 20 days leading up to his second inauguration. The director is Brett Rater, and the cast is headed up by…you guessed it…Melania Trump. The running time is 104 minutes. That’s a bit long for my taste, but I haven’t seen the film, so I can’t speculate whether that much time was needed to tell the story.
Melania’s rating on IMDb.com is 1.3 out of 10. That’s based on 42K ratings. The film was released in theaters on January 30. Will the rating climb to a respectable number in the future? If so, there’s a long way to go.
As I said, I refer to the IMDb for information about films and TV miniseries I’m planning to watch. A rating near 9 gets my attention as it denotes a must see. For ratings of 7.5 on up, you usually can’t go wrong if you like the subject matter and/or the director and cast. Even a high 5 or 6 can be worth watching. But a 1.3? That’s nearly off the charts in the wrong direction. To get a number that low, a whole lot of users would need to assign a rating of 0 (yes, 0) or 1.
As second check, I also visited the Rotten Tomatoes website. Melania’s ratings there are 5 for the Tomatometer and 1.9 out of 5 for the Popcornmeter as given by all audiences. Those are not good numbers. Since it takes 60 percent on up positive reviews by film critics to be considered fresh, the Tomatometer rating says Melania is epically rotten.
Finally, I asked my new friend Microsoft Copilot whether an IMDb rating of 1.3 has been achieved by any other recent documentary releases. The response was that IMDb ratings below 2.0 are extremely rare for any film category and that documentaries seldom fall this low because they attract more favorable niche audiences. Most poorly received documentaries still sit well above 3.0–4.0, and none appear in IMDb’s official Bottom 100 list. Melania is uniquely low at 1.3/10 and appears to have broken the all‑time record.
Perhaps the book, if there is one, will be better.
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