MELANIA: THE MOST EXPENSIVE NOTHING IN THE WORLD

Jeff Bezos spent forty million dollars to prove that even unlimited money can’t buy attention. Melania Trump pocketed another twenty-eight million and delivered a documentary about as gripping as an insurance policy. Amazon presumably thought this was a big deal. What they’re left with is a film so uninteresting that people wouldn’t watch it even if they were paid to. Theaters put it on their schedules because Amazon put cash on the table. Now they’re sitting there with empty auditoriums, unsure whether to laugh or cry. Minneapolis, Portland, Jacksonville: zero tickets sold. Boston: one ticket. Regal City North: four screenings, zero viewers. Saturday night, 7:15 p.m., AMC Americana — the holiest hour of American moviegoing — one hundred and fifty empty seats staring at a screen no one came to see. This isn’t a flop. A flop requires that someone, at some point, actually cared. The American audience looked at this documentary — not the film itself, but the idea of it — and decided it would rather stay home. Out of sheer boredom.

In Boston there really was a ticket buyer, the search is ongoing. A single one. The theater had scheduled three screenings and had to refund this poor MAGA activist because you do not open an auditorium for one person. That is how the story about the fifty dollars was born. As if you had to bribe people to go in. The joke works so well because it is terrifyingly close to the truth. Amazon did not simply spend a lot of money on a bad film. That happens all the time. Amazon spent a lot of money on a film so irrelevant that not even the usual outrage machines kicked into gear. Conservative blogs tried to frame it as propaganda, progressive media as normalization. Both gave up after two days because nobody cared. A film that unites left and right - through shared disinterest.

The theater owners are now doing the math on how much each screening costs. Electricity, staff, heating. One manager admitted that their three a.m. horror movies perform better. Let that sink in: people would rather go to some trash movie in the middle of the night than see a high budget documentary about the First Lady during the day. Critics largely ignored the film. Not boycotted it, not shredded it - ignored it. Variety wrote half a sentence. Rolling Stone asked a question. The rest stayed silent. That is more brutal than any takedown. A bad review can still be sold as a misunderstanding. Silence is final. Now the question is what Amazon does with it. They could pull it from theaters after a week and dump it on Prime, where it will vanish between crime series and cooking shows. Or they could mount an Oscar campaign. Full page ads in trade magazines, screeners to the Academy, the whole routine. The Academy still would not watch it, but at least you could say you tried to salvage something from the embarrassment.

What is truly grotesque is not that the film flopped. Films flop all the time. What is grotesque is that it was produced for forty million dollars and still gets less attention than a YouTube video of a hamster. Melania cashed twenty eight million. Bezos paid forty. The theaters lose money. And the audience is simply not there. Forty million dollars. Hundreds of empty seats across the country. A film that exists but reaches no one. This is not just a flop. It is a monument to irrelevance. Bezos bought the most expensive nothing in the world, and now he has to watch it play to empty rooms.