Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.
The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.
According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.
“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.
“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.
The mandatory cinema consumption featuring great leader’s family will continue until morale improves.
Some of her other works might be better suited for improving morale
Meh.
Agree, hard pass.
“Against their will” sounds funny in context. I was forced to do plenty of things in the military against my will. Most dealing with PowerPoint presentations.
Isn’t the point of joining the military is to surrender free will? That’s one of the many reasons I didn’t want to.
In war, mostly yes. But the majority of the time, they only control your work hours. There’s a ton of caveats to that but day to day, it’s like any other job. But they cannot make you spend money on something like this. I don’t know if I could have not laughed in their face for trying to pressure that.
*This varies more or less depending on the branch.
Seems like we are at war.
If they’re gonna do propaganda, why is it in the most pathetic way?
Shouldn’t it be a film about national pride or something like that?
Because it works. Most of Trumps propaganda is pathetic, but it still works doesn’t it. Still in power, escalating more and more.
I suspect that it’s a reaction to the various successful media projects by Michelle Obama. In Trump’s mind, the Obamas are making him look bad by being smart/successful/…, so this is Trump’s attempt at showing that his first lady too can create a successful media project. Because the Trumps are tasteless and have surrounded themselves with sycophants, there wasn’t anyone around to tell them how crap the movie was, so it got released as it is.
The big tell that this was Trump’s attempt at trying to one up the Obamas, is that once it became obvious that the Melania movie was bombing, Trump posted a super racist video about the Obamas. He tried to one up the Obamas creatively, failed, and then resorted to insults.
Meanwhile Melania is 28 million dollar richer, so as usual she probably doesn’t care that much about how bad this makes her look.
Maybe it could be about the triumph of the will? That might be nice.
The ironic thing is that if it was a real documentary, talking for example how they met, how she got citizenship, her involvement in his businesses etc then a lot of people would watch it. Heck, I don’t care about movies about first lady, but I would watch it.
It’s just for some reason they want to keep so far away from those topics they n made it about the 20 days before second inauguration.
Lol thats not a $75M film. That’s an $82M film because that 7 million in sales was also spent by the same people who made it.
Its actually a 50M film with a 25M advertising budget… They haven’t even made their advertising expenses back. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out 75% of ticket sales were bought with the ad budget. I never saw an ad for it.
… please clap…
Pathetic.
WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU ONLY MAKES YOU STRONGER
Morale will improve or you get the movie again!
This is some real North Korea type stuff.
It’s the enemy military right? It’s torture right?
Did the asswipes force the soldiers to pay an admission fee to watch the crap film? The drunk wife beater also wants the North Korean fake clapping and tears.
It does read like that. That various “superiors” were “encouraging” people to go see it in the theater. Pretty much the only way to inflate the numbers and avoid “military uses millions of dollars to buy tickets for a movie”.
Thankfully this shit hasn’t made it to my installation. I’m guessing these eight bases “world-wide” have to be targeting the USMC.
The Marines get the absolute bottom of the barrel treatment even as far military members go.
Private, don’t worry, I won’t make you bomb that dinghy in the Caribbean Sea for no reason. Instead you can watch Melania and prepare me a film review report by next week.
I read this elsewhere and I thought it was satire.
Well, at least hopefully this will cause dissent in the army as they stop taking him seriously.
Even though I disagree with torture in all instances hard to feel bad for someone who agreed to help oppress and murder billions for the bourgeois.
