Unusual Record for Melania on Rotten Tomatoes; Audience Score “Not Fake”
According to the CinemaDrame News Agency, Melania is one of the most expensive documentary films ever made, produced and distributed with a $75 million budget. In its opening week, it grossed over $7 million, becoming the highest-grossing documentary of the past decade. However, another striking aspect of Melania is the massive gap between its critics’ and audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes.
This discrepancy prompted Rotten Tomatoes to respond, issuing a statement in Variety confirming that the audience score is not fabricated: “Audience reviews for the Melania documentary were not manipulated by bots. Reviews displayed on PopcornMeter have been verified, meaning that ticket purchases by users have been authenticated.”
Melania received a 5% critics score and a 99% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, setting a record for the largest gap on the platform. Past controversies, such as the low scores for Captain Marvel, had led many to assume that Melania’s audience rating was fake.
Forbes reported that many of the user reviews for Melania resemble AI-generated text but noted that nowadays many people use AI to assist in writing.
Previously, Melania received a 1.3 out of 10 on IMDb, one of the lowest scores in the site’s history. Its Metacritic score is similarly low at 1.4 out of 10, though moviegoers gave it an A on CinemaScore.
Critics harshly condemned Melania, calling it little more than “propaganda.”
