The South African distributor of the documentary “Melania” pulled the film from theaters hours before it was to debut Friday, citing “recent developments.”
South African Melania Trump adherents will have to wait until the documentary about her second trip to the White House drops on Prime.
“Based on recent developments, we’ve taken the decision to not go ahead with a theatrical release in territory,” Filmfinity’s head of sales and marketing, Thobashan Govindarajulu, told the South African outlet News24 on Wednesday. Govindarajulu provided no further details other than to tell The New York Times that it had been “our decision.”
The “recent developments” attribution generated a fair amount of head-scratching, given the abundance of developments flooding the world’s radar. Was it economic, as ticket sales refused to take off? Was it the optics of the glitzy, exclusive screening Melania Trump and director Brett Ratner hosted last Saturday, hours after federal agents fatally shot an intensive care nurse documenting ICE abuses in the streets of Minneapolis? Or could it have been the inclusion of Ratner himself, dogged by decade-old sexual misconduct allegations and an apparent nightmare to work with, as crew told Rolling Stone.
Hostility between the U.S. and South Africa stoked by President Trump’s yarns about anti-white racism there and allegations of anti-white genocide, were another possibility, as were the tariffs he has lobbed in South Africa’s direction, among other political jabs.
It may have been all of the above, as anti-Trump website Meidas Touch noted. At least, until Katie Miller, podcaster and wife of White House immigration architect Stephen Miller also claimed anti-white racism. “Of course — since they are biased against white people,” she wrote on X in reply to a Meidas Touch tweet.
