On the film criticism website Rotten Tomatoes, movies with a large culture war salience often have a major disparity between the critics’ score, called the Tomatometer, and the audience score, now known as the “Popcornmeter.” This has often happened with superhero movies, as well as political ones, most recently with Melania, the new documentary about First Lady Melania Trump that was released last week. (Full disclosure: The author of this story is a film critic who contributes to the Tomatometer on the critics’ side.)
In the days after the film was released, Rolling Stone reported that Melania had the widest disparity between the critics’ score and Popcorn score in the history of the site.
The parent company of Rotten Tomatoes has been forced to deny that critic-shamed ‘Melania’ was declared a fan favorite by an army of MAGA bots.https://t.co/6KnoiKzRkA
— Daily Beast’s Obsessed (@beastobsessed) February 6, 2026
“A spokesperson for the review aggregator confirmed to Rolling Stone that Melania officially earned the dubious distinction on Wednesday evening,” the site said. “At press time, the film had a five percent score on the site’s Tomatometer — which represents the percent of positive reviews from critics — and a 99 percent score on its Popcornmeter, representing positive reviews from moviegoers.”
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Lopsided audience scores for movies on RT have sometimes been the result of manipulation campaigns, although the site has in recent years taken new steps to suppress such efforts. But the site has denied that this happened in Melania‘s case.
“There has been NO manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary,” a Rotten Tomatoes spokesperson told Rolling Stone in a statement. “Reviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film through Fandango.”
If those positive reviews are legitimate, one possible explanation is that very few people who aren’t fans of Melania Trump and her husband chose to see the film, so most of the reviews are from people who saw it and were likely to like it. As for critics, the film was not made available to them before its release, leading some critics to buy tickets to the film after it opened.
Melania came in third at the domestic box office last weekend, with $7.1 million in receipts.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
