Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood call for Phantom Thread music to be removed from Melania | Melania

Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the director and composer, respectively, of Phantom Thread, have asked for music from the 2017 film to be removed from the controversial new documentary about Melania Trump.

“We have learned that a piece of music from Phantom Thread was used in Melania’s documentary,” the couple said in a statement to Variety. “While Jonny Greenwood does not own the copyright in the score, Universal failed to consult Jonny regarding this third party use in breach of his composer agreement. As a result, Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have requested that it be removed from the documentary.”

The film Melania, directed by Brett Ratner, aims to provide an inside look into the former life of Melania Knaus, the Slovenian model who married Donald Trump and now serves as the First Lady of the United States. Critics have uniformly panned it as dull and unrevealing. In a rare zero-star review, The Guardian’s Zane Brooks called it “killer”, “frustrating” and “one of those rare films that doesn’t have the edge of a unicorn”.

The film grossed $13.35 million domestically over two weeks in theaters — a high figure for a documentary, supported in part by organized groups of Republican women who view the film as a political issue, though not enough to recoup its budget. This past weekend saw the film drop 67% in its second weekend in the US.

Amazon paid MGM a staggering $40 million for the streaming rights to the film, then paid another $35 million to market it in theaters, an unprecedented amount for a live-action film that’s not about nature or music.

The extraordinary numbers sparked speculation in the industry that Amazon made the purchase to get closer to Trump, who was helping engineer Ratner’s comeback after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement.

In November 2025, it was reported that Rush Hour 4, a sequel to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker’s buddy cop series that Ratner had long sought to revive, was a trip to Paramount Skydance, after Trump intervened. The president reportedly pressured his friend and supporter Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder in the new Paramount Skydance company — which earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump over a critical CBS News interview with the president — to secure financing for the film.

Last week, while accepting a screenplay award from the London Critics Circle, Anderson said he wanted to share the award with The Guardian Brooks for his review of Melania, calling the film “a gilded remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, in which a button-eyed Cinderella points out gold ornaments and designer dresses, slyly distracting us as her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the Constitution and strip the federal government of its assets.”

“It was one of the best pieces of writing,” Anderson said. “very good.”

Phantom Thread received six Academy Award nominations, including Best Original Score.