Melania Trump 2-part docuseries arrives this year, first lady reveals
A two-part docuseries about Melania Trump arrives later this year, the first lady revealed Wednesday. The new project follows the January release of director Brett Ratner’s documentary, which made $16.7 million worldwide at the box office and was universally panned by critics.
“It will come out this year, and it will be very different what is in the movie,” Trump told “Fox & Friends” ahead of her appearance to ring the New York Stock Exchange opening bell. “It’s more [like a] conversation one on one with me.”
Trump indicated that the docuseries will cover new ground.
“So when I was traveling and doing all of the filming, the director was asking me questions, and there’s some private questions that I will answer that people never heard before,” she said.
The Times has reached out to Amazon Studios for more information on the project, which does not appear in press materials, though Ratner teased the new “chapters” in an Aug. 11 Instagram post.
“Here we go again….” the director wrote. “The saga continues …. can’t wait to share with everyone around the world the next two chapters of MELANIA, THE DOCU SERIES!”
Ratner’s film followed the first lady in the 20 days leading up to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration, promising “exclusive footage capturing critical meetings, private conversations, and never-before-seen environments” as Melania “orchestrates inauguration plans, navigates the complexities of the White House transition, and moves her family back to the Nation’s Capital.”
Critics, however, found the cinematic experience lacking.
“I’m hesitant to call ‘Melania’ propaganda because I can’t imagine anyone watching this movie and thinking that Melania Trump comes off well,” Times film critic Amy Nicholson wrote in a February review. “If this vapid, airless, mindless time-waster had subversive designs of being a satire about the first lady of the United States, there’s not much it would have changed. Yet somehow, ‘Melania’ is exactly the film that the first lady wanted to make — her company was paid $40 million for the rights to this self-greenlit production — and no one around her warned that it was a very expensive bad idea.”
“Melania” was Ratner’s first film since six women accused him of sexual assault in 2017. In February 2026, The Times reported that the “Rush Hour” filmmaker appeared in the unsealed Epstein files in photos with unidentified women and the financier, who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
In addition to the initial $40 million Amazon MGM Studios paid to license the project, the marketing and promotion budget was reportedly another $35 million.
