A military group has evidence of troops being ordered into theater—the movie theater.

Thousands of active-duty military personnel may have been “pressured” into seeing the Melania documentary at cinemas around the country, a watchdog has warned.

The $75 million Amazon film opened last week to $7 million at the box office—despite universally terrible reviews.

According to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, those numbers have been artificially inflated by pressure from MAGA-aligned officers leaning on their troops to buy tickets.

“People are scared,” Mikey Weinstein, president and founder of the MRFF, said. Weinstein said he has received letters from members of the U.S. military at eight facilities worldwide, complaining that their superiors encouraged or pressured them to see the film.

“Nobody that I know wanted to go except for those that did not want to get jacked up by our unit commander for not attending,” one of those members told Weinstein in a letter seen by journalist Jonathan Larsen.

  • MousePotatoDoesStuff@lemmy.world
    2·
    4 months ago

    I read this elsewhere and I thought it was satire.

    Well, at least hopefully this will cause dissent in the army as they stop taking him seriously.

  • Gammelfisch@lemmy.world
    6·
    4 months ago

    Did the asswipes force the soldiers to pay an admission fee to watch the crap film? The drunk wife beater also wants the North Korean fake clapping and tears.

    • CaptPretentious@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      It does read like that. That various “superiors” were “encouraging” people to go see it in the theater. Pretty much the only way to inflate the numbers and avoid “military uses millions of dollars to buy tickets for a movie”.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
    24·
    4 months ago

    Kelly told them they don’t have to follow illegal orders, and forcing them to watch this movie sounds like a war crime.

    • hector@lemmy.today
      7·
      4 months ago

      Good god, this sounds like some shit they would do to those torturees at guantanamo, force them to watch this shit on repeat until they confess.

      I shouldn’t make light of it we did some horrific torture at guantanamo, probably still do, popular music and movies is actually part of it, playing the same music on repeat, hot and cold temperature changes, stress positions, all sorts of disgusting shit, along with sexual abuse.

      We stopped pretending to be a civilized country in 2001.

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
    5·
    4 months ago

    Maybe they’ll be mad enough to disregard illegal orders next time they’re ordered to do something illegal.

  • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
    23·
    4 months ago

    If they’re gonna do propaganda, why is it in the most pathetic way?

    Shouldn’t it be a film about national pride or something like that?

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      I suspect that it’s a reaction to the various successful media projects by Michelle Obama. In Trump’s mind, the Obamas are making him look bad by being smart/successful/…, so this is Trump’s attempt at showing that his first lady too can create a successful media project. Because the Trumps are tasteless and have surrounded themselves with sycophants, there wasn’t anyone around to tell them how crap the movie was, so it got released as it is.

      The big tell that this was Trump’s attempt at trying to one up the Obamas, is that once it became obvious that the Melania movie was bombing, Trump posted a super racist video about the Obamas. He tried to one up the Obamas creatively, failed, and then resorted to insults.

      Meanwhile Melania is 28 million dollar richer, so as usual she probably doesn’t care that much about how bad this makes her look.

      • hector@lemmy.today
        2·
        4 months ago

        It’s not that they don’t know the movie is shit, it’s that they don’t care. They are happy juicing it to have good numbers even when everyone hates it. Just as the president is happy having his name on something where all the people in it hate him, he’s happy having a nobel peace prize on his mantle that was given to someone else.

        He’s just a pathetic man, and can’t or won’t hide it in his old age as he loses control of his faculties and the party leads him around by the hand to dismantle his America First Legacy and the like. Talk about Sad.

    • Sheep Herder@lemmy.world
      4·
      4 months ago

      Because it works. Most of Trumps propaganda is pathetic, but it still works doesn’t it. Still in power, escalating more and more.

  • ceoofanarchism@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    92·
    4 months ago

    Even though I disagree with torture in all instances hard to feel bad for someone who agreed to help oppress and murder billions for the bourgeois.