The News
The director and producer Brett Ratner, forced out of Hollywood at the peak of the #MeToo movement, will direct a documentary about First Lady Melania Trump for Amazon, the studio confirmed Sunday.
The move is both a warm embrace by the e-commerce giant for the incoming administration and a dramatic return for Ratner, the director of X-Men: The Last Stand and the Rush Hour movies.
One person who spoke to Semafor said they’d been surprised that Ratner, who reportedly lives in Israel now, had recently been seen at Mar-a-Lago. Last year, he and US President-elect Donald Trump were reportedly among the guests at the wedding of the son of businessman Al Malnik, who is close to Ratner.
Ratner’s Hollywood career stopped in 2019 when an actress accused him in the Los Angeles Times of forcing himself on her sexually, and other women described inappropriate conduct. A different woman accused him of rape in a Facebook post, then retracted that allegation. Ratner denied all of the allegations, and he was never charged with misconduct.
The allegations came “at a moment of extreme sensitivity to sexual harassment issues in the entertainment industry,” Variety reported at the time.
Amazon said in a statement that the film, which began shooting last month and is set for release in theaters and on Prime Video in the second half of 2025, will offer an “unprecedented behind the scenes look” at the First Lady. It’s being produced by the Argentine documentarian Fernando Sulichin, who has worked in the past with director Oliver Stone.
Amazon didn’t immediately respond to an inquiry as to whether the Trump family or organization is being compensated for participating in the film. Ratner didn’t respond to inquiries over email and to his social media accounts Saturday.
The news was first reported on X by Variety’s Tatiana Segal early Sunday morning, after Amazon rushed out an announcement.
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Ben’s view
Amazon’s purchase of the Melania Trump documentary is the latest entry in an escalating, head-snapping bidding war by the giant tech platforms to ingratiate themselves with an incoming president their executives had, in the past, criticized. Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos had positioned himself as a Trump critic before swiveling to support the President-elect this fall.
But the documentary, and Ratner’s return, also represent a changed cultural moment, in which the values and icons of Trump’s MAGA movement are making their way “upstream” from politics into mass American culture, as the conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart used to put it. And the culture’s new gatekeepers — the tech platforms, first of all — are rejecting progressive judgments on people and content.
Notable
- Hollywood doesn’t appear ready to forgive Ratner, the Hollywood Reporter wrote: His presence is a “stumbling block” to Rush Hour 4.
- Ratner emigrated to Israel, the Times of Israel reported in 2023, and was a guest of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the United Nations.