Nobody in Britain is going to see the new Melania movie – I've crunched the data to prove it
I really don't care, do u?
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I’m still on my month-long pause – back in a few days! – but I couldn’t resist sharing this.
You might not have noticed, but Melania Trump has a new film out. Directed by Brett Ratner, who for some reason hasn’t made any other films since 2018, Melania tells the story of what she got up to in the 20 days leading up to her husband’s second inauguration last year. I guess they were more confident of a peaceful transfer of power this time around.
Anyway, I know what you’re thinking – “isn’t it great to see a documentary get a full theatrical release, given the state of the film industry?”. But I guess Amazon must be confident that it is going to be a huge success – it has bankrolled the film to the tune of $40m. Why else would it be spending the money?
However, I fear that this might not be the case for poor old Jeff Bezos. In recent days, there are signs this might have been wide of the mark, as the film’s reception has been described as “soft” by the Chief Executive of Vue Cinemas here in the UK.
And this made me wonder – exactly how soft is that? How many people in Britain are actually planning to see the film?
So I decided to crunch the numbers and investigate, by digging into seat reservations on the Vue website. Here’s what I’ve learned, ahead of Melania’s release on Thursday.
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Melania in pre-sale numbers
First, here’s some context. At the time I crunched the data – Tuesday lunchtime – there were 878 screenings of Melania scheduled. These span the entire country, across 47 Vue cinemas. Of the available screenings, there are in total 70,765 seats available.
So how many seats has Melania sold? Again, as of Tuesday lunchtime, it was… 1,160.
That’s 1.6% of the total seats available, and an average of 1.8% of the seats filled in each screening.
Here’s a chart showing the breakdown of the cinemas with the most seats filled. I guess Birmingham – population 1.14 million – must really love Melania! (It’s also one of the largest cinemas in Europe).
Birmingham is also winning in terms of proportion of seats filled too – closely followed by Altrincham, and Watford.
And here’s a chart showing when seats have been sold for. Unsurprisingly, most are for the first weekend, with sales trailing off after. Though the end of the tail fascinates me most. Imagine being someone who has booked to see Melania on the second weekend after release – long after the reviews are in, and long after any conceivable rubbernecking-factor will have worn off.
But there’s the other thing about this data. To add some important caveats – sales might actually be worse than the numbers imply.
I’ve done my best to sense-check it, so I’m pretty confident that the data I collected on seats filled is mostly accurate. However, I produced this quickly, vibe-coding my data collection, and I think there are a handful of cinemas where my code has accidentally counted a free wheelchair seat as occupied. So I might be accidentally inflating it slightly.
And then there’s the fact that I don’t know exactly how Vue’s internal system works. For example, it could be the case that just because a seat is shown as unavailable online, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has been sold. In Screen 6 of Altrincham’s Vue, for example, every showing has the same three seats marked as occupied – which is either a massive coincidence, or suggests that certain seats have been marked on the system as out of action because they are broken, or someone was sick on them, or whatever. In a couple of cases I’ve seen looking through the data, entire rows right at the front of the screen are already occupied – which suggests something weird is going on.
So this is all to say that, sadly, it’s not looking like Melania is going to be troubling any highest-grossing lists, at least here in the UK. Perhaps the film won’t be the huge smash-hit that Amazon was surely hoping for after all?
Maybe sales are different at Odeon and Cineworld, or at independent, art-house cinemas. But somehow I doubt it.
So I guess what this data reveals is that – unsurprisingly – Britain doesn’t care about Melania. Maybe they’d be better off casting Barron Trump as the new Bond instead?
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