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 on Nov. 6, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon Prime Video announced Sunday that it is licensing a documentary film about once-and-future first lady Melania Trump.
The movie, first reported by Fox News.com, came to light weeks after a Wall Street Journal report that Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon, planned to donate $1 million to the inaugural fund of President-elect Donald Trump.
Bezos, who has previously been criticized by Trump, also met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida after his election win over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Amazon Prime Video has exclusively licensed an upcoming documentary film for both theatrical and streaming release that will give viewers an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look at First Lady Melania Trump,” an Amazon spokesperson said Sunday.
“Filming began in December 2024, with an anticipated release in the second half of 2025. Prime Video will be sharing more details on the project as filming progresses and release plans are finalized. We are excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” the spokesperson said.
The Melania Trump movie is being executive produced by Fernando Sulichin of New Element Media and is being directed by Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Ratner, who denied the allegations, had not made a movie since then.
CNBC has reached out for comment from Bezos, whose estimated $238 billion fortune puts him at No. 2 on Forbes’ list of wealthiest people in the world.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon alleged it lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft because Trump used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy,” Bezos.
Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, speaks during 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 movie deal came to light two days after Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at The Washington Post — which is owned by Bezos — said she had resigned from the newspaper because her bosses blocked the publication of a satirical cartoon depicting Bezos and other billionaires kneeling before Trump.
The cartoon features satirical drawings of Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg holding up bags with dollar signs to Trump, who is on a pedestal. Another man seen kneeling before Trump, holding up a lipstick tube, represents Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher and owner of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
Soon-Shiong in October blocked the LA Times’ planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election against Trump.
Satirical drawing by Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after it was rejected.
Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
The Washington Post’s news section previously reported that Bezos decided that the paper would not publish its own planned editorial page endorsement of Harris.
Telnaes in a blog post Friday wrote that it was the first time that the Post killed one of her cartoons “because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at.”
“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote.
Washington Post editorial page editor David Shipley said 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 – for publication.”
“The only bias was against repetition,” Shipley said in a statement.
Post publisher Will Lewis has denied that Bezos played a role in killing the Harris endorsement.
Several members of the Post’s editorial board resigned from that board due to the decision to spike the endorsement.
NPR on Saturday reported that 300,000 people canceled digital subscriptions between that news outlet breaking the news of the killed endorsement on Oct. 24 and Election Day. That tally “represents about 12% of all digital subscriptions,” according to NPR.