Former U.S. President and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and former first lady Melania Trump smile after speaking during an election night event at the West Palm Beach Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, early November 6, 2024.
Jim Watson | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon Prime Video announced Sunday that it is licensing a documentary about former first lady Melania Trump.
The film, first reported by Fox News.com, came to light weeks after a Wall Street Journal report that Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazonplanned to donate $1 million to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund.
Bezos, who has previously been criticized by Trump, also met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida following his election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Amazon Prime Video has licensed an upcoming documentary exclusively for theatrical and streaming release that will give viewers an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at First Lady Melania Trump,” an Amazon spokesperson said Sunday.
“Filming began in December 2024, with release scheduled for the second half of 2025. Prime Video will share more details about the project as filming progresses and release plans are finalized. “We're excited to share this truly unique story with our millions of customers around the world,” the spokesperson said.
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The film “Melania Trump” is executive produced by Fernando Sulichin of New Element Media and directed by Brett Ratner, who was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women in 2017. Ratner, who denied the allegations, has not made a film since.
CNBC has reached out to Bezos, who ranks No. 2 on Forbes' list of the world's richest people with an estimated fortune of $238 billion, for comment.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon Microsoft because Trump “exerted undue pressure… to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.
Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, speaks during The New York Times' annual DealBook Summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 4, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Melania Trump's film deal was revealed two days after Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist at the Washington Post – which Bezos owns – said she resigned from the paper because her bosses were refusing to publish a satirical cartoon featuring Bezos would have blocked and other billionaires kneel before Trump.
The cartoon features satirical drawings of Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Metaplatforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg holds up bags with dollar signs in front of Trump, who stands on a podium. Another man kneeling in front of Trump and holding up a tube of lipstick represents Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire publisher and owner of the Los Angeles Times newspaper.
Soon-Shiong blocked the LA Times' planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election against Trump in October.
Satirical drawing of Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who resigned after being rejected.
Courtesy of Ann Telnaes
The Washington Post's news department previously reported that Bezos had decided that the newspaper would not publish its own planned editorial page endorsing Harris.
Telnaes wrote in a blog post Friday that it was the first time the Post had killed one of its cartoons “because of my choice in who or what I aimed my pen at.”
“The killed cartoon criticizes the billionaire tech and media executives who have done their best to curry favor with the new President Trump,” Telnaes wrote.
David Shipley, editorial page editor of the Washington Post, said the cartoon was rejected because “we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and already had another column – this time a satire – scheduled for publication.”
“The only bias was against reruns,” Shipley said in a statement.
Post publisher Will Lewis has denied that Bezos played a role in preventing Harris' endorsement.
Several members of the Post's editorial board resigned from that board over the decision to increase support.
NPR reported Saturday that 300,000 people canceled digital subscriptions between the news of the slain poll worker's release on Oct. 24 and Election Day. That number represents “about 12% of all digital subscriptions,” according to NPR.
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