Melania debuts at number 29 at the UK box office | Melania

“Melania,” director Brett Ratner’s documentary about the current First Lady of the United States, opened at No. 29 at the UK box office on its first weekend of release. The film, which cost Amazon $40 million to buy and $35 million to promote, opened in 155 cinemas across the UK and Ireland, where it took a gross of £32,974, with a site average of £212.80.

This result will make distributors breathe a sigh of relief, as – despite the modest takeovers – this is far from the disaster that many expected. The scale of the rollout was unprecedented in the UK documentary sector, where most titles are limited to around 25 locations.

Melania’s haul is at least as high as the £33,000 the Prime Minister – the latest documentary about former New Zealand leader Jacinda Ardern – made during its first weekend of release. This film was shown on 28 screens in the UK (18% of Melania’s total run) making the site’s average price £1,178.57 (more than five times Melania’s).

While many of Melania’s shows were either empty or very few attended, some were sold out. For example, the early afternoon show at the Vue Islington in London had to turn away potential punters, almost all of whom were journalists.

Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet topped the UK box office in its fourth weekend of release, earning £1,412,612 across 737 sites with a site average of £1,917. That was just a ticket or two above The Housemaid, Paul Feig’s thriller, which grossed £1,399,262 in its sixth week of release, across 596 sites with a site average of £2,348.

The top five was rounded out by two other new releases – Shelter (£946,903) and Iron Lung (£948,731) – and Zootropolis 2, which earned £855,208 in its 10th week of release.

Additional chart information is not currently available from tracking and analytics firm Comscore, but a representative added that Melania was the ninth best-performing new release for the week. 12 new titles were released in the UK last Friday, including Bollywood releases Mardaani 3 and Gandhi Talks, both of which are showing in a limited number of screens.

While its international box office results have yet to be announced, the film has defied its dire expectations in the US, where it entered the charts at number three and grossed $7 million. In order to break even, Ratner’s film would need to take in around $100 million globally.

The film currently has a 10% on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, and a score of seven out of 100 on Metacritic. Meanwhile, it currently holds a rating of 1.3/10 from over 22,000 votes on the Internet Movie Database, as well as the same score on social media review site Letterboxd. This is up from the 1.0 it reached earlier in the weekend on IMDb, making it the lowest-rated film of all time.