3 hours ago
3
Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, the director and composer, respectively, for Phantom Thread, have requested that music from the 2017 film be removed from the controversial new documentary on Melania Trump.
“It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the Melania documentary,” the pair said in a statement to Variety. “While Jonny Greenwood does not own the copyright in the score, Universal failed to consult Jonny on this third-party use which is a breach of his composer agreement. As a result Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have asked for it to be removed from the documentary.”
Melania, directed by Brett Ratner, purports to provide an inside look at the life of the former Melania Knauss, the Slovenian model who married Donald Trump and now serves as first lady of the United States. It has been uniformly panned by critics as dull and unrevealing; in a rare zero-star review, the Guardian’s Xan Brooks called it “deadly”, “dispiriting” and “one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”.
The film has made $13.35m domestically over two weeks in theaters – a high tally for a documentary, powered in part by organized groups of Republican women who view the film as a political cause, though not nearly enough to recoup its budget. The past weekend saw the film drop 67% in its second weekend in the US.
Amazon MGM paid a staggering $40m to acquire streaming rights for the film, then paid another $35m to market it in theaters, an unprecedented sum for a nonfiction film not about nature or music.
The unusual numbers have prompted industry speculation that Amazon made the purchase to cozy up to Trump, who has been helping to engineer a comeback for Ratner after numerous allegations of sexual misconduct during the #MeToo movement.
In November 2025, it was reported that Rush Hour 4, a sequel to the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker buddy-cop series that Ratner had long sought to revive, was a go at Paramount Skydance, after Trump intervened. The president reportedly lobbied his friend and backer Larry Ellison, the largest shareholder of the new Paramount Skydance – which, earlier this year, as Paramount Global, settled a lawsuit with Trump over a critical CBS News interview with the president – to secure funding for the film.
Last week, while accepting a screenplay prize from the London Critics’ Circle, Anderson said he wanted to share the award with the Guardian’s Brooks for his Melania review calling the film “a gilded trash remake of Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest in which a button-eyed Cinderella points at gold baubles and designer dresses, cunningly distracting us while her husband and his cronies prepare to dismantle the constitution and asset-strip the federal government”.
“It was one of the best pieces of writing,” said Anderson. “Pretty damn good.”
Phantom Thread received six Oscar nominations, including best original score.
