Why Documentary Filmmakers Should Be Worried

It should come as no surprise that Amazon’s documentary “Melania,” about First Lady Melania Trump, grossed $7 million at the box office over the weekend, making it the highest opening for a non-music documentary in over a decade.

That’s not because “Melania” is an exquisitely made, informative documentary. It’s not even a documentary.

Instead, it falls in the category of glossy advertisement or unconvincing propaganda film with a multimillion-dollar music licensing budget. Amazon MGM Studios paid $40 million for the rights to film. That offer came with a jaw-dropping $35 million marketing budget, which Amazon spent while also cutting 16,000 corporate jobs.  

The film is the latest streamer-funded, carefully choreographed, boring, celebrity puff piece being branded as a documentary. Previous examples of documentaries in this category include “Michael Jackson’s This Is It,” “With Love, Meghan,” and, most recently, “Victoria Beckham,” a Netflix docuseries. (To be fair, all three of those documentaries were far more revealing than “Melania”; the only thing that one learns about Melania Trump during her 104-minute infomercial is that her favorite song is Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.”)

But the merits of Brett Ratner’s “Melania” don’t matter. The film is and will continue to be a box office hit because anti-woke, conservative, and faith-based documentaries thrive theatrically.

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Take Matt Walsh’s 2024 “Am I Racist?” — a right-leaning film that tears into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The film was that year’s highest-grossing documentary, earning $12 million at the box office. That same year, a documentary titled “Vindicating Trump” earned $1.3 million theatrically, which for any documentary these days is a lot of money. “Vindicating Trump” was the sixth highest-grossing documentary in 2024.

Over a decade ago, before the Trump era, conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016: Obama’s America” and “America: Imagine the World Without Her” grossed $33 million and $14 million at the box office, respectively.

It’s been over 20 years since progressive documentaries were box-office juggernauts. In 2004, Michael Moore’s Academy Award-winning film “Fahrenheit 9/11,” a searing look into the George W. Bush administration and the War on Terror, grossed $119,194,771 worldwide, making it the highest-grossing documentary of all time.

‘Fahrenheit 9/11’©Lions Gate/Courtesy Everett Collection

In 2005, Davis Guggenheim’s Oscar-winning feature documentary “March of the Penguins,” about global warming, earned $77,437,223 worldwide. That is in stark contrast to the 2025 Oscar-winning feature documentary “No Other Land,” about the occupied Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta, which grossed $3.6 million worldwide. Other recent Oscar-winning documentaries, like “20 Days in Mariupol” and “Navalny,” earned just $35,000 and $107,000 worldwide, respectively.

What the documentary industry should be worried about is what the box office success of “Melania” means for filmmakers motivated to make complex nonfiction films with a worldview that disrupt the status quo and have the potential to offend President Trump and his MAGA base. Movies not like “Melania.”

Eight years ago, during “the golden age of documentary,” streamers like Amazon made it clear that although they were corporate behemoths, they weren’t worried about Trump, who was serving his first term as president. In 2020, Amazon reportedly spent $5 million for global rights to Garrett Bradley’s documentary “Time,” about a Louisiana woman’s 20-year effort to secure her husband’s release from prison.

That same year, the company released the documentary “All In: The Fight for Democracy” about Stacey Abrams, the first Black woman to become a major-party gubernatorial nominee in the United States. In 2019, the streamer acquired the worldwide rights to the documentary “Mayor Pete,” which followed democrat Pete Buttigieg on his presidential campaign trail, and in 2016 the company, owned by Jeff Bezos, acquired exclusive streaming rights to Raoul Peck’s “I Am Not Your Negro,” a documentary about late author James Baldwin who, in the film, describes the depressing state of American race relations. Both “Time” and “I’m Not Your Negro” received Academy Award nominations.

But things changed last year when not only Amazon, but also Paramount and Disney, went after the rights to “Melania.” It was a clear and deliberate signal to the documentary industry that they would not offend Donald Trump or his MAGA base with progressive documentaries.

‘I Am Not Your Negro’Magnolia Pictures

Last month at the Sundance Film Festival, documentary filmmakers and producers discovered, according to multiple sources, that Amazon wasn’t in the market to acquire and commission any documentaries. Not surprisingly, the company’s 2026 budget for nonfiction fare has been used in its entirety to produce and release “Melania.”

Amazon’s absence at Sundance is another blow to an industry that has been suffering to stay afloat. Not only are traditional buyers like HBO not buying or commissioning as many documentaries as they did a decade ago, but budgets across the board have also been slashed. Whole documentary divisions have been eliminated or consolidated. A24 shut down its documentary filmmaking department in May 2025.

In January, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down after the Trump administration and Congress voted to defund the organization. CPB is the entity behind PBS, a cornerstone of the doc marketplace.

Then there is tech billionaire Jeff Skoll, the founder and chair of the former socially conscious powerhouse production company Participant Media. Together with the late Diane Weyermann, Skoll produced and helped fund numerous documentaries like “An Inconvenient Truth ” and “RBG” that fed the public’s appetite for thought-provoking subject matter. In 2024, Skoll not only closed Participant but also hosted a Donald Trump inauguration victory rally.

Currently, the majority of indie documentary filmmakers are relying on an unsustainable self-distribution model and the service-deal marketplace.

In Park City, documentary filmmakers, producers, and cinematographers networked, hoping to land a job or at the very least, get a lead on a potential job opportunity. But the writing is on the wall. The future of socially minded or politically progressive documentaries is in jeopardy, and there isn’t a left-leaning version of Jeff Bezos to swoop down and save the industry.

Only so many documentary filmmakers and producers can be hired to make more nonfiction films for streamers about celebrities, cults, and true crime. Celebrated documentary filmmakers and producers are turning to reality television for work. Some had to work with Ratner on “Melania” to keep financially afloat. According to Rolling Stone, two-thirds of the crew members who worked on “Melania” requested that their names not be formally credited in the documentary.

“I understand if a liberal is working on the movie and they don’t want to be credited, but they want to feed their family,” Ratner told Variety. “I don’t blame anybody for that.”

It’s a scary time for documentarians. Will they have to start working with the likes of Brett Ratner to make infomercials that please Donald Trump to pay the bills? The success of “Melania” suggests they might.

Other streamers like Apple, whose CEO Tim Cook attended the White House premiere of “Melania,” could potentially turn their back on the documentary community and attempt to make current event, politically minded documentaries disappear. HBO and Netflix are holdouts. Both companies still support social issue films that tackle politics.

‘The Alabama Solution’©HBO Max/Courtesy Everett Collection

HBO’s “The Alabama Solution,” a hard-hitting exposé of the brutal Alabama state prison system, and Netflix’s “The Perfect Neighbor,” a film that takes aim at America’s stand-your-ground laws, both received Oscar nominations in the best feature documentary category this year.” Later this year, fingers crossed, HBO will release Alex Gibney’s Elon Musk documentary “Musk.”

Without timely documentaries that confront power and interrogate the truth, there’s a vacuum to be filled with propaganda.