Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and former first woman Melania Trump smile after talking throughout an election night time occasion on the West Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, early on Nov. 6, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon Prime Video introduced Sunday that it’s licensing a documentary movie about once-and-future first woman Melania Trump.
The film, first reported by Fox News.com, got here to mild weeks after a Wall Street Journal report that Jeff Bezos, the founder and government chairman of Amazon, deliberate to donate $1 million to the inaugural fund of President-elect Donald Trump.
Bezos, who has beforehand been criticized by Trump, additionally met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago membership in Florida after his election win over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Amazon Prime Video has solely licensed an upcoming documentary movie for each theatrical and streaming launch that may give viewers an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes have a look at First Lady Melania Trump,” an Amazon spokesperson mentioned Sunday.
“Filming started in December 2024, with an anticipated launch within the second half of 2025. Prime Video will likely be sharing extra particulars on the venture as filming progresses and launch plans are finalized. We are excited to share this really distinctive story with our hundreds of thousands of shoppers world wide,” the spokesperson mentioned.
The Melania Trump film is being government produced by Fernando Sulichin of New Element Media and is being directed by Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused by a number of ladies of sexual misconduct. Ratner, who denied the allegations, had not made a film since then.
CNBC has reached out for remark from Bezos, whose estimated $238 billion fortune places him at No. 2 on Forbes’ record of wealthiest folks on this planet.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged it misplaced a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft as a result of Trump used “improper strain … to hurt his perceived political enemy,” Bezos.
Jeff Bezos, founder and government chairman of Amazon and proprietor of the Washington Post, speaks through the New York Times annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 04, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
The Melania Trump film deal got here to mild two days after Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at The Washington Post — which is owned by Bezos — mentioned she had resigned from the newspaper as a result of her bosses blocked the publication of a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos and different billionaires kneeling earlier than Trump.
The cartoon options satirical drawings of Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg holding up baggage with greenback indicators to Trump, who’s on a pedestal. Another man seen kneeling earlier than Trump, holding up a lipstick tube, represents Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire writer and proprietor of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
Soon-Shiong in October blocked the LA Times’ deliberate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris within the presidential election towards Trump.
Satirical drawing by Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after it was rejected.
Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
The Washington Post’s information part beforehand reported that Bezos determined that the paper wouldn’t publish its personal deliberate editorial web page endorsement of Harris.
Telnaes in a weblog put up Friday wrote that it was the primary time that the Post killed certainly one of her cartoons “due to who or what I selected to goal my pen at.”
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who’ve been doing their greatest to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote.
Washington Post editorial web page editor David Shipley mentioned the cartoon was rejected as a result of “we had simply printed a column on the identical matter because the cartoon and had already scheduled one other column – this one a satire – for publication.”
“The solely bias was towards repetition,” Shipley mentioned in an announcement.
Post writer Will Lewis has denied that Bezos performed a task in killing the Harris endorsement.
Several members of the Post’s editorial board resigned from that board because of the determination to spike the endorsement.
NPR on Saturday reported that 300,000 folks canceled digital subscriptions between that information outlet breaking the information of the killed endorsement on Oct. 24 and Election Day. That tally “represents about 12% of all digital subscriptions,” in line with NPR.
