Apple, Amazon, Comcast among funders of White House movie theater demolition

The White House movie theater is said to be renovated in what will presumably be President Trump's gold-finished image.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  October 23, 2025 | 5:15pm
(Photo by Eric Lee/Getty Images)
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Apple, Amazon, Comcast among funders of White House movie theater demolition

Several of the world’s wealthiest companies privately donated to the demolition of the United States’ most famous publicly owned movie theater. Per The Hollywood Reporter, without congressional approval, and during a government shutdown, which will see upwards of 40 million people lose food-assistance benefits, Apple, Amazon, and Comcast joined Google, Meta, Microsoft, T-Mobile, and former Marvel head Ike Perlmutter’s family foundation to demolish the East Wing of the White House. Among the casualties of this historic and unprecedented demolition of a publicly owned landmark—aside from the basic norms of a president not typically leveling the White House—is the White House movie theater, where President Trump once watched Finding Dory as his first “Muslim ban” sent his citizens into a panic. THR‘s sources say that “the movie theater will be modernized and renovated with the rest of the East Wing,” presumably with a golden Coke Freestyle machine that will never be cleaned.

In the administration’s typically petulant tone, the White House Press Office released a statement, claiming that “unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies” had “manufactured outrage” and were “clutching their pearls” over the sight of the president demolishing the side of the White House. The “unhinged” don’t understand “President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House — a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and additions from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence.”

The White House movie theater was over a century old. Appropriately, the first film screened in it was D.W. Griffith’s The Birth Of A Nation for President Woodrow Wilson. (Something something doomed to repeat it.) But perhaps the most scandalous screening there came more than 100 years later, when, in January 2017, President Obama watched the 2016 children’s movie Monster Trucks. It would be the last film screened for the Obamas in the White House, and it serves as a flashpoint in American history, when the United States went full-bore into fuck it mode.

 
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