Who is Brett Ratner? Once a powerhouse in Hollywood whose career was leveled by sexual assault allegations, he’s waging a comeback by directing the new Melania Trump documentary.
‘Melania’ trailer – The Trumps return to White House in documentary
Melania Trump is the subject of the documentary “Melania,” which covers the 20 days leading up to President Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
The first lady is the star of the Melania Trump documentary, but all eyes in Hollywood are on who’s seated in the director’s chair.
Brett Ratner, once one of the film industry’s hottest names, hasn’t made a movie since 2014’s “Hercules” after six women, including actresses Olivia Munn and Natasha Henstridge, accused Ratner of sexual harassment in a Los Angeles Times report. He’s now doing a very different kind of movie from the hit “Rush Hour” franchise or “X-Men: The Last Stand” with “Melania” (in theaters Jan. 30 and on Prime Video later this year). And there are reports from Variety and Deadline that Ratner will be helming a “Rush Hour 4” that’s in the works.
So is this the start of Ratner’s comeback? “I don’t think so,” says Jeff Bock, senior media analyst for Exhibitor Relations. “I think it’s the only job he could get.”
Purchased by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon MGM Studios for $40 million, “Melania” follows the 20 days leading up to President Trump’s 2025 inauguration through the perspective of his wife, as Melania Trump takes meetings and makes plans for her family’s return to the White House. The first lady, 55, also launched her own production company, Muse Films, ahead of the movie’s release.
Melania Trump movie is ‘unprecedented’ in American history
A lot of questions surround the movie, and not just the timing of it: The first lady went ahead with hosting an already-announced private White House screening of “Melania” for friends, family, celebrities and Amazon executives hours after the shooting death of Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minnesota.
Box office experts also don’t know how well it will do. “Forecasts are volatile on this one, as documentaries are a very unique beast in the tracking world,” says Shawn Robbins, Fandango’s director of movie analytics, and founder and owner of Box Office Theory. He adds that expectations are pointing to a “Melania” opening weekend of $3 million to $5 million.
Even $1 million would be a “huge number,” Bock says: “That would mean that a lot of folks who don’t normally go to the movies went to this.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Ratner’s representatives for comment about “Melania.”
“It’s a political documentary, but it’s not an important enough political figure that would actually necessitate people to buy a ticket for,” Bock says. “She hasn’t done anything that controversial or that interesting, to be blunt, to encourage people that might lean one way or another to say, ‘Hey, I’d like to know more about her.'”
For centuries, presidents and first families have used the media to put out a good image to the public. “Eleanor Roosevelt wrote a daily newspaper column, Jackie Kennedy hosted a televised White House tour, and other recent first ladies wrote memoirs,” says Katherine Jellison, a professor at Ohio University who specializes in first lady studies and gender in politics.
But “this particular arrangement is pretty unprecedented,” adds Joel Penney, an associate professor at Montclair State University with a focus in cultural studies and political communication. “The idea of having a studio backing this and releasing it in theaters has certainly never been attempted in U.S. presidential history.”
Brett Ratner was a box-office powerhouse before sexual harassment allegations derailed his career
Then there’s Ratner’s involvement. Once one of the top names in Hollywood, Ratner, 56, made $40.9 million with his 1997 debut, the Chris Tucker/Charlie Sheen comedy “Money Talks.” But his career really took off with the massively popular “Rush Hour” trilogy starring Tucker and Jackie Chan.
In 2017, six women accused the filmmaker of sexual misconduct amid the #MeToo movement. Munn described how Ratner masturbated in front of the then-aspiring actress on the set of his 2004 movie “After the Sunset.” Henstridge alleged that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex when she was a teenage model, and four people involved in the production of Ratner’s “Rush Hour 2” in 2001 recalled how the director chased young women and established a predatory atmosphere on set.
No criminal charges were filed against him and Ratner denied the allegations in a statement through his lawyer: “Brett Ratner vehemently denies the outrageous derogatory allegations that have been reported about him, and we are confident that his name will be cleared once the current media frenzy dies down and people can objectively evaluate the nature of these claims. He understands the seriousness of this issue and the importance of addressing the concerns of victims of sexual misconduct both in the entertainment industry and beyond.”
Still, his RatPac Entertainment production company ultimately parted ways with Warner Bros. Pictures.
In December, Ratner popped up in a photo from a batch of Jeffrey Epstein files released by the Justice Department, which also included images of prominent names such as Tucker, President Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Mick Jagger, Michael Jackson and Diana Ross. Ratner is shown posing in an undated photo with a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and longtime Epstein associate. In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in his jail cell while facing charges in France of raping a minor and supplying minors to the disgraced financier.
Marc Beckman, senior adviser to Melania Trump and a credited producer on the documentary, tells USA TODAY that the first lady “considered several filmmakers and had some discussions with people that had various capabilities as far as executing and implementing our creative vision.”
Ratner has produced several documentaries, including “Night Will Fall” and “Before the Flood,” but he’s never directed a full-length documentary before. Ultimately, he was chosen for having “a proven track record of creating some really compelling imagery on the silver screen,” Beckman said. “We believed that he was capable of creating a film that had that very rich cinematic experience that we were looking for, that the first lady was looking for. And furthermore that he could assemble a best-in-class team to realize that very rich cinematic expression, which he did.”
Is ‘Melania’ documentary a Brett Ratner comeback or just ‘a paycheck’?
Ratner’s participation likely won’t sway the average moviegoer to see “Melania” or not.
“I would imagine that not a lot of people are paying attention to the director of a documentary in the first place,” Penney says, noting how comedians such as Louis C.K. and Russell Brand have been embraced by the right for their “anti-woke” stances, after they were exiled from Hollywood in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations.
“The idea of conservative media rehabilitating figures that have been ‘canceled’ is something we’ve seen,” Penney says. “The involvement of Ratner speaks to the way this [film] is speaking to a certain type of audience. I don’t think a lot of conservative Trump supporters are too concerned with the #MeToo movement.”
But it’s uncertain if the project will chart a new Hollywood rise for Ratner or even just stop his precipitous fall.
For the filmmaker, “Melania” is “a paycheck,” Bock says. “Let’s be honest, Hollywood wouldn’t touch him with a 10-foot pole right now and hasn’t for a decade, and that means something. Hollywood is a very tight-knit circle, and obviously it’s very liberal.
“No studio has hired this guy for over a decade, a guy who made millions upon billions of dollars at the box office with his films,” Bock adds. “Hollywood is very keen to give second chances to directors who have made a lot of money. And the fact that they won’t with him means that he did some things that were very bad, or at least everybody in Hollywood believes it. So that can’t really go unnoticed.”
Hollywood will take notice if “Melania” becomes a box office success, though Bock thinks that, if anything, it would show there’s a “red state market” for films like this rather than a clamoring for more Ratner.
Bock does thinks “Rush Hour 4” will eventually happen. Ratner “may be an executive producer, but I would be shocked, honestly, if he came back as a director,” Bock says. “I’m sure he wants to. I’m sure his handlers want him to. That would be big for him, and nostalgia and ideas are where it’s at right now.”
‘Melania’ documentary could spark sharply divided reaction
“Melania” has been kept away from anyone other than invited guests. Most journalists won’t be able to see the film before it opens in theaters this weekend ‒ likely as a way of controlling the narrative.
“This movie is very obviously going to be raked over the coals by most film critics who are not Trump fans,” Penney says. “It’s going to be absolutely eviscerated.” That said, “it’ll probably get a lot of glowing coverage in conservative media outlets.”
Given the controversy around President Trump wanting to take over Greenland, as well as the fatal shootings in Minneapolis by federal authorities, “the timing of the release isn’t promising,” Jellison says. “We are in a week of what might be termed ‘Trump fatigue,’ with the president’s poll numbers [on immigration] going southward. Under these circumstances, I don’t see moviegoers flocking to see the film.”
For the Trumps, a lot is riding on how the movie performs.
“If the film is a success, it will be a bright spot that the Trump administration can tout as evidence that the Trump ‘brand’ still has legs,” Jellison says. “If it is a failure, I suspect the press will present it as more evidence of the Trumps losing popularity, clout ‒ and perhaps relevance.”
Contributing: Jayme Deerwester and Anthony Robledo