Exclusive: Ex-Amazon Studio Head Ted Hope on Amazon's $40M New Melania Doc

Welcome to 2025!!

In my final column of the year, I asked what the future holds for the big streamers and their evolving documentary content strategies.

Now, just a week into 2025, we have a first peek at Amazon’s new slate. It includes a documentary on Melania Trump. Executive produced by Melania Trump.

So who better than Amazon Studio’s former co-head, Ted Hope, to exclusively give us his take on this news?

Photo: NARA & DVIDS Public Domain Archive

First, let’s set this up.

Early Sunday morning Tatiana Segal broke the news on X that Amazon will release a Melania Trump bio pic in the second half of 2025. The director is Brett Ratner. Let’s just say Brett Ratner is not part of “the documentary community.” He directs action pics and left the Hollywood scene in 2017 in the wake of #MeToo allegations that he denies. (See more in these reports from the Los Angeles Times and Hollywood Reporter.) Ben Smith reported yesterday that Ratner has been hanging at Mar-a-Lago. And he once partnered with Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on a $450 million slate financing deal, according to Segal. So this team seems cozy.

The fact that Melania Trump is both the subject and executive producer signals she will both appear in and have a creative role in the making of the film. To be fair, it is actually pretty standard that famous subjects are involved in the making of their bio docs. The Elton John doc was co-directed by his husband. But obviously the stakes are totally different in this case. She is not a famous sports star trying to sell more sneakers. She is not a pop star trying to sell her back catalogue. She and her husband, Jeff Bezos, and Ratner have different agendas than simply fame and fortune at play.

But fortune is still part of the story. Puck reported, “Amazon is paying a cool $40 million to license the film, per three sources familiar with the deal. That price includes the Ratner documentary, which will get a small theatrical release and then appear on Prime Video, plus a previously undisclosed two-to-three-episode follow-up docuseries on the first lady. Melania will participate in both projects. (Amazon declined to comment.)”

It is important to note that an authorized documentary on Melania Trump does not fit into the kind of acclaimed, best in class documentaries Amazon has made in the past. While they have done plenty of celeb and true crime stuff, they also did lots of hard-hitting, artistic stuff too. The Oscar nominated Time on love, race and mass incarceration (for transparency, I was an EP). One Child Nation on China’s one child policy and a Primetime Emmy winner. My Name is Pauli Murray, about an early advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. And most recently the Oscar shortlisted Frida on Frida Kahlo.

So what should we takeaway from Amazon’s Melania Trump doc? I reached out to Ted Hope, the former co-head of Amazon Studios, to ask for his reaction to the news.