Amazon Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary about incoming first woman Melania Trump that’s set to be launched later this yr, an Amazon MGM Studios spokesperson confirmed to NBC News.
In an announcement, the spokesperson stated the documentary started filming final month. The undertaking lists each Melania Trump and Fernando Sulichin as government producers. Brett Ratner will direct the movie — he’s a co-owner of RatPac Entertainment, which was as soon as related to former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
“We are excited to share this really distinctive story with our tens of millions of shoppers around the globe,” the Amazon spokesperson added.
The announcement comes simply months after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory in November, and simply two weeks earlier than the couple is ready to return to the White House for a second time period.
The relationship between Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ companies and Trump has come underneath scrutiny in latest weeks as a result of a perceived new coziness between the 2 males.
Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2021 however nonetheless serves as the corporate’s government chairman. The billionaire additionally owns The Washington Post newspaper and Blue Origin, an aerospace firm.
During Trump’s first time period, there have been a variety of high-profile clashes between the then-president and Bezos or his corporations.
For instance, in a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged Trump launched “behind-the-scenes assaults” towards the corporate. The firm claimed that private and non-private assaults from the then-president led it to lose out on a serious cloud providers contract for Amazon Web Services.
Last week, a cartoonist on the Post, Ann Telnaes, shared publicly that she give up her job on the newspaper after she was blocked from publishing a satirical cartoon about tech CEOs, together with Bezos, kneeling earlier than the president-elect.
The different CEOs within the cartoon, Telnaes said, included Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Los Angeles Times writer Patrick Soon-Shiong.
Zuckerberg, Bezos, Altman and others have each pledged to donate $1 million to the president-elect’s inauguration committee.
Washington Post editorial web page editor David Shipley pushed again on the notion that Telnaes’ cartoon was canned due to Bezos.
In an announcement to CNBC, Shipley stated, “My determination was guided by the truth that 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.”
Telnaes’ revelation got here simply months after Post readers and present and former employees criticized the paper for announcing that it would no longer endorse presidential candidates.
In their own reporting, Post journalists wrote that the publication’s editorial board had determined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee. The similar article reported that Bezos himself made the choice to cease endorsing candidates.
In a bit printed days in a while the newspaper’s web site, Bezos wrote, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements truly do is create a notion of bias. A notion of non-independence. Ending them is a principled determination, and it’s the best one.”
Bezos didn’t instantly reply to an NBC News request for remark about whether or not he was in any respect concerned with securing the licensing for the forthcoming Melania Trump documentary.
