Analyst Predicts Low Opening for 'Melania' Documentary (Full Transcript)

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: So, you may have heard, tomorrow Melania opens in theaters nationwide. It's a documentary about the First Lady. Amazon paid huge money to Melania Trump's production company for this. They're paying even more to promote it. So how's it going to do? Senior Chief Data Analyst Harry Etten is here with me now. So what are the forecasts for how much it's going to bring in for this giant investment?

[00:00:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, for this giant investment, and this is getting a very wide release. It's so hot to try to write documentary ticket sales the first weekend. The top of all time, Fahrenheit 9-11, adjusted for inflation, we're talking about $41 million. Melania's forecast is not anywhere close to that, $1 million to upwards of $5 million. You don't have to be a mathematical genius to know that this number, $41 million, is significantly higher than the $1 million to $5 million forecast, despite this movie getting a lot of press and this documentary getting a lot of press.

[00:00:58] Speaker 1: You want to know something you may not know? Yeah. I'm in this quite a bit.

[00:01:01] Speaker 2: Oh, my God.

[00:01:02] Speaker 1: I'm all over Fahrenheit 9-11. I did not know that. I am. All right. Be that as it may, what are some of the predictions for how the reviews are going to be?

[00:01:09] Speaker 2: Okay. You know, I didn't realize I was standing here with a movie star, by the way. But if we look at the reviews, not particularly good. So what's the chance that Melania's Rotten Tomatoes score is below 20%? Of course, you don't want to be below 50%. You actually want to be above 60% for a fresh score. The chance that it's below 20%, ergo the critics are not going to like it, is 73%. 73%. The chance that it's above 50% is way lower than that. So the bottom line is this, at this point, the belief is part of the reason why the film is not going to do all that well is because there's a belief that the film is not all that good. And when we say it's big money, like how much money spent on this? Okay. So, you know, you see the amount of money that the forecast is for the opening weekend. You're going to obviously make more than that when you take in, you know, as it goes on in the theaters for at least a few weeks. But you see the 1 to 5 million, you might say, okay, how much did Amazon actually spend on this? A lot, a lot of money. We're talking about a film budget. They bought it for $40 million. Then the marketing budget is an additional $35 million. You talk about the total cost, we're talking about $75 million. I was looking back at some other documentaries, none of which that I could find except for maybe a few came anywhere close to this $75 million and the $40 million, even that would be about, based upon my research, probably a top five cost for a documentary. And those documentaries took years to make. This, of course, did not take years to make.

[00:02:41] Speaker 1: It's not like we have documentaries on every first lady, you know, going back to Martha Washington here. But how does Melania Trump rank among first ladies according to her story?

[00:02:50] Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, you know, the critics, we don't expect that the critics are going to like this film. Critics generally much, at least historical critics, don't really like Melania Trump either. I mean, just take a look. Historians, first lady rankings, the bottom three, dead last, Melania Trump. When you're next to Jane Pierce and Margaret Taylor, those are not particularly good, although we were able to get a colored photo of Melania Trump.

[00:03:11] Speaker 1: I have nothing bad to say about either Margaret Pierce or Jane. Apparently you disagree with the historians then. Yeah, I mean, you know, what can you say about them? Not much. All right. Thank you very much.