Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and former First Lady Melania Trump smile after speaking during an Election Night event at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, early November 6, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | getty images
Amazon Prime Video announced Sunday that it has licensed a documentary film about former first lady Melania Trump.
The film, first reported by Fox News.com, comes just weeks after a report by Wall Street Journal founder and chairman Jeff Bezos. AmazonHe planned to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration fund.
Bezos, who had previously been criticized by President Trump, met with the president-elect at the Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after defeating Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Amazon Prime Video has exclusively licensed the upcoming documentary film for both theatrical and streaming release, which will give viewers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at First Lady Melania Trump,” an Amazon spokesperson said on Sunday. .
“Filming began in December 2024 and is scheduled for release in the second half of 2025. Prime Video will share more details about the project as filming progresses and release plans are confirmed. We look forward to sharing this truly unique story with millions of people.” We’re excited to share it with our viewers and customers around the world,” the spokesperson said.
The Melania Trump film is being executive produced by Fernando Sulichin of New Element Media. Brett Ratner, who was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women in 2017, is directing. Ratner, who denied the allegations, has not made a film since.
CNBC has reached out to Bezos for comment. His fortune is estimated at $238 billion, putting him second on Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the U.S. Department of Defense. microsoft That’s because President Trump used “inappropriate pressure…to harm Bezos, a perceived political enemy.”
Jeff Bezos, founder and chairman of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, speaks at the New York Times annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 4, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | getty images
The Melania Trump movie deal came to light two days after Anne Telnath, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Bezos-owned Washington Post, said she resigned from the paper because her bosses blocked the publication of satirical cartoons depicting Bezos. And other billionaires who kneeled before Trump.
The cartoon features Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and meta platform CEO Mark Zuckerberg is holding a bag with a dollar sign to Trump on the podium. Another man kneeling in front of Trump and holding a tube of lipstick is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher and owner of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
In October, Xiong blocked a plan by the Los Angeles Times to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election against Trump.
A satirical drawing by Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after being rejected.
Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
The Washington Post’s news section previously reported that Bezos had decided not to publish his own plans for Harris on his editorial page.
Telnaes wrote in a blog post Friday that this was the first time Post had killed one of his comics “because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at.”
“The slain cartoon criticizes billionaire technology and media CEOs who have been doing their best to curry favor with President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote.
“The cartoon was rejected because we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column, this one a satire,” said David Shipley, editorial page editor at the Washington Post. “he said.
“The only bias is against repetition,” Shipley said in a statement.
Post publisher Will Lewis denied that Bezos played a role in undermining Harris’s support.
Several members of the Post’s editorial board resigned from that board over the decision to soar its approval rating.
NPR reported Saturday that 300,000 people canceled their digital subscriptions between news outlets reporting news of supporters killed on Oct. 24 and Election Day. According to NPR, this figure “represents about 12% of all digital subscriptions.”
