A suburban Portland movie theater said it was ordered this week to stop screening a documentary about Melania Trump after the distributor objected to how the film was promoted.
Jordan Perry, general manager of Lake Theater & Cafe in Lake Oswego, said Amazon MGM Studios contacted the theater earlier this week and told staff it could no longer show "Melania," a documentary that follows the first lady during the 20 days leading up to President Donald Trump's inauguration last year.
According to Perry, the decision followed complaints about messages displayed on the theater's marquee.
Before the film was removed from the schedule, the signage read "TO DEFEAT THE ENEMY, YOU MUST KNOW THEM" and "DOES MELANIA WEAR PRADA?," KOIN 6 reported.
The latter line referenced the 2006 film "The Devil Wears Prada."
Perry said the theater had already faced backlash from some patrons and online commenters for booking the documentary.
In a post published on the theater's website, he addressed criticism that screening the film amounted to political support for Trump or his administration.
"Why did I want to see Melania?" Perry wrote in a post to the theater's website.
"This seems to be the question without a reasonable answer for many messaging me," he continued. "And their main gripe is that if it is a signpost of our times, it is an inescapably toxic one: that showing Melania is necessarily supporting her, this administration, and this administration's policies. I don't think this way! I think a lot of people don't think this way! For me there was no dividing line between wanting to see it and showing it here."
Perry said the theater's programming decisions are not guided by politics and that the documentary was chosen based on audience interest and limited alternatives.
He noted that other films available at the time, including the R-rated titles "Send Help" and "The Bone Temple," were unlikely to perform well at the venue.
Amazon MGM Studios distributes "Melania," which was directed by Brett Ratner and reportedly carried a production budget of $75 million.
Despite the controversy surrounding individual screenings, the documentary has posted strong box office results nationwide.
According to Deadline, the film debuted with $7 million in ticket sales, marking the largest opening for a nonfiction feature in the past decade.
Beckman, who has been promoting the film in media appearances, praised the opening during an interview on Newsmax's "The Count."
"It's official," he said. "We are the number one highest opening in the past decade for documentaries."
Beckman cited an A CinemaScore, a metric based on opening-weekend audience surveys, as evidence of the film's reception.
"And we got it," Beckman said, after describing the film's rating. "It's very rare for movies to score with an A."
Zoe Papadakis ✉
Zoe Papadakis is a Newsmax writer based in South Africa with two decades of experience specializing in media and entertainment. She has been in the news industry as a reporter, writer and editor for newspapers, magazine and websites.
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