'Melania,' panned by some film critics, opens with strong ticket sales for a documentary

[RockRaven]

5. "for a documentary" doing heroic heavy lifting there...

"Well, it's a flop by those budget standards, but great revenue for a documentary" -- DOCUMENTARIES NEVER COST THIS MUCH, so measure it by the budget not the film category.

To give a sense of the aberrant scale of cost difference we're talking about:
James Cameron's documentary about the Titanic, Ghosts of the Abyss, using cutting-edge custom-built submersibles/ROVs to film the actual wreckage at the bottom of the ocean... Budget $13M.
March of the Penguins, a film shot in Antarctica which means hostile conditions and hellacious logistics... Budget $8M.
Free Solo, an Oscar winning documentary in the late 2010s about free climber Alex Honnold doing the first ever free solo climb of El Capitan in Yosemite... Budget $2M.



But, yeah, $7M, this country has a hell of a lot of fart-sniffing worms in it.