If Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos are known for anything, it’s their ability to take a joke.
Which is why it’s so surprising that Amazon would pull Melania from a movie theater after some gentle mocking about the film appeared on its marquee.
As first reported by The Oregonian, and then nationally spotted by The Daily Beast, an Oregon theater long known for finding creatively witty ways to advertise its movies was asked by Amazon to stop screening Melania.
The Lake Theater and Cafe in Lake Oswego had touted last week’s release of Amazon MGM’s controversial documentary with declarations such as “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out Friday” and — quoting Sun Tzu’s The Art of War — “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday.”
Then manager Jordan Perry says their booker received a call from somebody at Amazon asking the theater to pull the film.
“The studio was not happy and/or did not appreciate my take on marketing their film to our own public,” Perry told The Oregonian. The theater marquee was then changed to: “Amazon called. Our marquee made them mad. All Melania showings cancelled. Show your support at Whole Foods instead.” This was followed by “Join Amazon Prime for Free Two-Day Shipping.” (Amazon had no immediate comment on the matter).
The theater’s management noted on Instagram that they also received plenty of backlash from local moviegoers long before the film was pulled. Many were upset their quirky Portland suburb cinema was screening Melania in the first place.
“Before then, we got countless emails and voicemails and Google / Yelp reviews (Google / Yelp took them down) wondering why the hell we had Melania here, or disdaining our disparaging of her,” the Instagram statement read. “Now that it’s prematurely over, the plug pulled on us not from public outcry (always listening, thank you) but by some corporate executive (fair enough, sorry AMZN, please don’t cancel my Prime).”
Perry noted that his theater sold a whopping $196 worth of tickets for the film during its single weekend (the film has done quite well nationally — the best showing in a decade for a documentary, despite scathing critic reviews).
Perry further explained he booked Melania for a simple — and pretty amusing — reason: Given how left-leaning the area is, he thought screening Melania would be funny (plus, he notes, it was a pretty dead time for new movies anyway).
“Wouldn’t it be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show [Melania] here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighborhood cinema?” he wondered.
And it might have been — had anybody on either side had a sense of humor about it.
