Rotten Tomatoes swears all its Melania audience reviews are real

(Of course, there have also been allegations and insinuations that the film’s good-for-a-documentary-unless-you-paid-$75-million-for-it initial $7 million box office take has been inflated by bloc purchases of tickets that were then given away for free to attendees, but there’s been no hard evidence to back up those claims. Rotten Tomatoes verification is based on proof of purchasing tickets through online vendors like Fandango.)

At present, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t list the total number of “Verified” audience reviews it has for Melania, simply labeling it as “1,000+.” (Critics, only 8 percent of whom gave the movie a positive score, instead number at 49.) Trawling the audience reviews, they are, unsurprisingly, effusively and almost uniformly positive, with many skipping over the qualities of Ratner’s movie in favor of simply talking about how much they like FLOTUS herself. Which is the thing about verified audience reviews, right? What they’re measuring is a matter of meeting expectations—of whether people excited enough for the movie to buy a ticket for it online ended up liking it. It is not wholly surprising, in that light, to see that people inclined to watch a highly flattering documentary about Melania Trump were happy with what Ratner plopped down in their laps. You can accuse Melania of a lot of things, sounds like, but not of failing to give its die-hard advocates exactly what they wanted.