The $7 million opening weekend for First Lady profile film “Melania” looks absolutely paltry when stacked against its $40 million acquisition fee — making it the most expensive documentary in Hollywood history. But that tally is enough to make it one of the highest in recent box office history for what has become an endangered species in theaters: the political documentary.
While Jeff Bezos’ company wrote a big check to Melania Trump to acquire her new documentary and an upcoming docuseries, more liberal and progressive documentary filmmakers have struggled to find funding over the last several years, often settling for streaming releases rather than theatrical bows — especially after the shuttering of major doc player Participant Media in 2024.
The chatter surrounding the critically reviled “Melania” comes as the documentary market overall is in a slump, with funding drying up and studios largely buying only true crime, celebrity or sports docs. It’s a stark contrast to when Michael Moore’s George W. Bush takedown “Fahrenheit 9/11” grossed over $220 million in 2004, or even the 2010s when political docs were more prevalent.
Producers, art house owners and new distributors are working to rebuild a new theatrical market for docs in this changed environment, where streaming is king and a greater share of the studios are suddenly owned by mega-corporations whose political positions may butt heads with sharper, more pointed commentary.
“When we started, our goal was to fill in the void that Participant left behind,” said Justin DiPietro, EVP of marketing and distribution for progressively minded Watermelon Pictures, which launched in 2024. “We were admirers of what they did to bring documentaries to the big screen and want to play a similar role in engaging the audience.”
The doc downturn
During Donald Trump’s first term as president, theatrical distributors and streamers alike entered multiple bidding wars at Sundance for liberal-minded films like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez doc “Knock Down the House,” and indie distributors like Magnolia Pictures released titles like “RBG” to solid theatrical success. Even beyond politics, films like National Geographic’s “Free Solo” — whose subject, Alex Honnold, just climbed Taipei 101 for a live global Netflix audience — became box office successes, with that film grossing $29 million worldwide in 2018 and even playing in Imax theaters.
But “Melania” hit 1,778 theaters last weekend in a post-pandemic market where the only big hit documentaries have been music docs like Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” and Sony Pictures Classics’ “Becoming Led Zeppelin.”
“Melania” now stands as the best theatrical opening for any non-music documentary in the last 10 years. The next best film? “After Death,” a 2023 Christian documentary from Angel about near-death experience survivors that opened to $5 million. After that is “Am I Racist?,” the right-wing Daily Wire-produced documentary with $4.5 million in 2024.
In all three cases, these films got a targeted wide release as opposed to the limited launch and slow nationwide expansion of 2010s films like the Fred Rogers profile “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” which has the benchmark for non-music docs that “Melania” will try to clear with a $22.8 million domestic run before inflation in 2018.
And as for more recent, left-leaning political documentaries, last year’s Best Documentary Feature Oscar winner “No Other Land,” which chronicled the forced displacement of Palestinians by Israeli settlers in Gaza, grossed $2.5 million last year from a self-distributed theatrical run after all major distributors passed on releasing it.
Meanwhile, this year’s batch of Oscar-nominated docs, all of which premiered at Sundance last year, have nearly no theatrical footprint:
- “The Perfect Neighbor”: Recounts the killing of Ajike Owens, a Black woman living in Florida, by her white neighbor. Acquired by Netflix out of Sundance last year, it received a one-week theatrical run before its streaming release.
- “The Alabama Solution”: Exposes the mistreatment and squalid conditions suffered by inmates in Alabama’s prison system. Acquired by HBO out of last year’s Sundance for a television and streaming release.
- “Cutting Through Rocks”: Tells the story of an Iranian woman who becomes the first female elected official in her village. Executive produced by former MTV Documentary Films head Sheila Nevins, the film grossed less than $25,000 from a limited self-distribution run.
- “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”: Chronicles efforts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to control public perception of his invasion of Ukraine through footage captured by a videographer at a rural primary school before escaping to Europe. The film opened in two theaters in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 22 by Kino Lorber and grossed just under $12,000.
- “Come See Me in the Good Light”: Recounts the life of poet Andrea Gibson, their marriage to wife Megan Falley, and coming to terms with their mortality following a terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis. Released straight to streaming by Apple with select screenings held to promote the film.
That’s not to say that a straight-to-streaming release necessarily comes with a lack of promotional commitment. Lauren Haber, producer of “Come See Me in the Good Light” and head of documentaries at Amplify Pictures, told TheWrap that Apple went the extra mile in promoting the film with special screenings, including several in Gibson’s home state of Maine.
“They didn’t just promote the film to Andrea’s fans. They made sure that those who would most want to see the film were aware of it: poetry readers, queer artists and really anybody who has dealt with caring for an ill partner or someone who has gone through cancer,” she said. “Yes, there [was] an awards campaign attached to it, but Apple showed they really understood the layers of relatability of the story we were telling and promoted ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’ with that in mind.”
Of course, that’s not always a guarantee, and Deirdre Haj, indie producer and president of Art House Convergence, said that films that don’t get the bespoke attention Apple gave to its Oscar contender could quickly get lost in the streaming shuffle.
“If you make a film and it’s picked up by a giant corporation that politically maybe doesn’t love it, the algorithm could just bury it,” she said. “That’s a side of streaming we don’t really get to look into. There’s a dark hole that can happen when you’re dealing with a media company that owns an online platform.”
Planting new seeds
At a time when Hollywood consolidation has the entire theatrical market fighting an existential battle, this one section of the market has a lot of work to do to find audiences willing to buy a ticket for socially minded fare.
But Haj and Art House Convergence interim executive director Lela Meadow-Conner say there’s a whole industry of filmmakers and exhibitors working to get thought-provoking docs out there to those willing to pay a ticket for them. Meadow-Conner noted that the self-distribution route taken by “No Other Land” after its Oscar win last year, when nobody wanted to release a movie about Palestine and Israel in theaters, has become one that more filmmakers are willing to consider.
“For filmmakers who have a topical doc they’ve made, if they’re willing to think outside the box and do things a little bit differently, there are folks who will work with them and get them not just in theaters, but in theaters that value documentaries and have a customer base that does the same,” she said.
Haj noted that while some distributors who used to put docs in theaters, like HBO and CNN, have largely pulled out of the market, there are still some stalwarts like “RBG” producer Magnolia, which released the docs “Folktales” and “It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley” last year, and Neon, which released Raoul Peck’s “Orwell: 2+2=5.”
But it is the newer players in distribution that have gotten Haj’s attention — like Suncatcher Productions, a women-run doc label founded by Annalisa Shoemaker in 2023, which released the Oscar nominee “To Kill a Tiger,” and Watermelon Pictures, which Badie and Hamza Ali used to elevate the voices of Palestinian filmmakers, many of whom are documentarians.
“When I go to festivals, I’m meeting with sales agents and doc filmmakers telling them we are in the market for docs, and that’s a breath of fresh air for a lot of them,” said Justin DiPietro, who worked at IFC Films and Cohen Media Group before joining Watermelon as EVP. “The hard work we’ve had to do over the last two years was prove to exhibitors that we have access to a great grassroots impact department that can get people to come out to the cinemas.”
DiPietro said the film that really gave Watermelon a foothold with art houses was “The Encampments,” which chronicled the 2024 student protests at Columbia University and several other major universities demanding divestment from Israel in response to the war in Gaza. The film notably contained interviews with Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia graduate student facing deportation at the hands of the Trump Administration.
Following Khalil’s arrest in March 2025, Watermelon moved up the release of “The Encampments” to draw attention to his story. From an exclusive release at the Angelika in New York, the film drew multiple sold-out screenings and grossed $80,000 in one weekend.
“We didn’t have to ask for more screenings. Angelika just added it themselves. It was the quietest $80,000 I’ve ever made as a distributor,” he said. “I think it was because there was so much unease around talking about Israel and Palestine and Trump was going after people who spoke out that we had to fight to get the word out. Our ads on Meta were suppressed, and nobody from the local New York press wrote about how we were doing even though the Angelika is such a big theater here.”
Instead, the continued interest in “The Encampments” came from engaging with the student protesters in New York that were still protesting, along with other organizers in the space like Jewish Voices for Peace. It was through that engagement that Watermelon began to successfully replicate what Participant Media had done for years: getting people and groups most involved with a doc’s core issues to come to the theater and spread word of mouth.
And that has paid dividends for Watermelon as it was contacted by award-winning doc filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, who last year received the documentary prize at Cannes for his film, “The Six Billion Dollar Man,” and was still searching for a distributor. Using WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition fight as a starting point, Jarecki explored the threats to press freedom unfolding around the world.
“Eugene was going back and forth with edits after he premiered the film at Sundance, but he sought us out,” DiPietro said. “The Six Billion Dollar Man” will hit U.S. theaters later this year as Watermelon plans to expand its scope beyond Palestinian-focused films. Such films will still be a regular part of its slate — the studio produced the Sundance selection “American Doctor” — but is now also acquiring films like “White Man Walking,” which follows filmmaker Rob Bliss as he walks 1,500 miles across Republican-majority states in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing while wearing a Black Lives Matter t-shirt.
These films will be released in many art houses where the financial impact of the pandemic and Hollywood’s decreased output is still being felt, and nimbleness in audience engagement and film programming is necessary to stay afloat. To that end, Meadow-Conner said Watermelon has become a prime example of how the new wave of doc distributors and self-distributing filmmakers have become such great partners with exhibitors.
“This new crop is very flexible about windows and holdovers and splits and that makes it so easy to get their films on screens,” she said. “That’s why ‘No Other Land’ lasted in art houses as long as it did, because they were willing to leave theaters for a bit and then come back when screens opened up, so they got good screen times when those screens opened up.”
It’s a case, as Haber notes, of figuring it out as everyone goes along. The documentary space in 2026, one where “Melania”can trigger a bidding war while the rest fight for what screens they can get, is far different from the environment she saw in 2017 when she produced the film “Trophy.” That doc explored the fight to protect endangered species from trophy hunting and received a limited theatrical release before airing on CNN.
“It was tough subject matter, but there was interest in getting all sorts of documentaries in theaters at the time,” she said.
Now, with a thrifty film industry scrutinizing whether a movie is worth the theatrical investment harder than ever, it’s not as clear whether a doc that isn’t a breezy music retrospective or concert film will be of interest to distributors, but Haber believes the audience for theatrical docs hasn’t vanished. It is just being underserved.
“It’s just going to maybe take some of these smaller distributors who are more bespoke to find the right projects where they know they can tap into the audience that will come and see that film in a theater, and as soon as a few of them do that really well, everyone else is going to look at that and be like, ‘Oh yeah, We forgot. We want to do that too.’”
