Melania is set to haul in more than $8 million in its opening weekend, which would be the best at the box office for a documentary in the last decade. A humble Ratner told Breitbart News via a phone interview Saturday that he gives “all the credit” to the first lady, the film’s subject, for its extremely successful box office performance.
“I have to give all the credit to Melania because this was something that she came up with, even, obviously, before she met me. The fact that she had hired a feature director like myself to do a documentary was very surprising, and for me as well. But she said to me from day one, I want this to be very cinematic. I want it to have a theatrical release. I want it to live and play in theaters,” Ratner told Breitbart News. “It’s very rare that documentaries get released in theaters. It’s usually straight to streaming, and even before they were streaming, documentaries were not in movie theaters – very, very rarely. So it was really her vision to have that and to see it through.”
“And I think one of the strategies was to hire me, who does big feature films, for the movie theaters,” he continued. “I think, as planned, we designed this movie to really live and breathe inside a movie theater. You could watch it on streaming down the road, but I think the audience felt that too, and that’s why they showed up. They showed up for the theaters, but from the material, from the campaign, the trailers, you realize, ‘Wow, this is a big screen production. This isn’t just a kind of episodic documentary.'”
Read Full Article Here
