Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and former first girl Melania Trump smile after talking throughout an election evening occasion on the West Palm Seaside Conference Heart in West Palm Seaside, Florida, early on Nov. 6, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Photos
Amazon Prime Video introduced Sunday that it’s licensing a documentary movie about once-and-future first girl 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 govt 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 Girl Melania Trump,” an Amazon spokesperson stated Sunday.
“Filming started in December 2024, with an anticipated launch within the second half of 2025. Prime Video shall be sharing extra particulars on the undertaking as filming progresses and launch plans are finalized. We’re excited to share this actually distinctive story with our thousands and thousands of consumers all over the world,” the spokesperson stated.
The Melania Trump film is being govt produced by Fernando Sulichin of New Aspect Media and is being directed by Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused by a number of girls 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’ listing of wealthiest folks on the 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 govt chairman of Amazon and proprietor of the Washington Publish, speaks in the course of the New York Occasions annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Heart on December 04, 2024 in New York Metropolis.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Photos
The Melania Trump film deal got here to mild two days after Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at The Washington Publish — which is owned by Bezos — stated 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. One other man seen kneeling earlier than Trump, holding up a lipstick tube, represents Patrick Quickly-Shiong, the billionaire writer and proprietor of the Los Angeles Occasions newspaper.
Quickly-Shiong in October blocked the LA Occasions’ deliberate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris within the presidential election towards Trump.
Satirical drawing by Washington Publish cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after it was rejected.
Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
The Washington Publish’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 publish Friday wrote that it was the primary time that the Publish killed considered 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 finest to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote.
Washington Publish editorial web page editor David Shipley stated the cartoon was rejected as a result of “we had simply revealed a column on the identical matter because the cartoon and had already scheduled one other column – this one a satire – for publication.”
“The one bias was towards repetition,” Shipley stated in an announcement.
Publish writer Will Lewis has denied that Bezos performed a task in killing the Harris endorsement.
A number of members of the Publish’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 keeping with NPR.
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