Oregon theater owner says Amazon yanked Melania over marquee joke

An independent theater in Lake Oswego, Oregon, just a few miles south of Portland, is reporting that the Amazon corporation does not, in fact, have a sense of humor when it comes to its new, very expensive Brett Ratner documentary Melania. Per the Lake Oswego Review, Jordan Perry, general manager for the small city’s Lake Theater & Cafe, is claiming that Amazon has yanked the movie out of theaters after he advertised the booking with taglines like “To defeat your enemy. You must know them. Melania,” and the slightly less confrontational, “Does Melania wear Prada? Find out on Friday!”

Perry wrote about the decision on the theater’s Instagram—which, we can’t help but note in passing, is also filled with hand-drawn movie posters that are pretty kick-ass—noting that the theater “Got a call that the higher ups (i.e., at Amazon) were upset with how our marquee marketed their movie (i.e., Melania), that, per them, Sunday would be its last day here.” Joking “please don’t cancel my Prime” and suggesting that devoted Amazon fans will have to “show your support at Whole Foods instead,” Perry noted both in the Instagram post and in a separate blog post that he also got quite a bit of pushback from the theater’s fans for screening the documentary at all. Titling the post “Why I, Jordan, Got Melania Here,” Perry wrote that, “Mostly, I thought doing so would be funny.” But also, “Financially, the film marketplace this week and next were a desert… So, to fill a screen, why not get this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife? I mean, it just seems so weird that it even exists (who wants a movie about Melania lol?), and wouldn’t it then be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show it here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighborhood cinema?”

Perry suggests that the theater may be on Amazon’s “black list” for a while, possibly impacting the release of upcoming films like Project Hail Mary. (He also notes that the film made the company about $196 during its truncated run, writing, “Jeff Bezos won’t notice the $196. He wouldn’t notice $1,960, though someone on his team noticed our marquee.”)

Anyway: “Wuthering Heights” starts 2/12.”