An Oregon theater with a history of edgy marquees has essentially been banned by Amazon from playing the film “Melania” because of jokes it made about the film’s protagonist, First Lady Melania Trump.
A marquee is a large sign advertising a theater’s films. The Lake Theater & Café, a theater in Portland, has a history of using its own marquee to post edgy jokes to attract the attention of potential filmgoers.
However, when the theater recently posted edgy jokes about “Melania,” the 2026 documentary about the current first lady, all hell broke loose.
“To defeat your enemy, you must know them. Melania starts Friday,” one humorous marquee joke that quoted Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” read.
“Does Melania wear Prada? Find out Friday,” another edgy marquee advertising the film read.
Amazon has pulled all screenings of ‘Melania’ at a local Portland movie theater because they didn’t like the marquee pic.twitter.com/fNWPPorAH3
— 🖤 Buy Physical Media 🖤 (@VHSDVDBLURAY4K) February 4, 2026
While the theater has been posting edgy jokes and memes for years, this time it evidently went too far, because Amazon, the owner of the documentary, immediately pulled the film from the theater.
“Got a call that the higher ups (i.e., at Amazon) were upset with how our marquee marketed their movie (i.e., Melania), that, per them, Sunday would be its last day here,” the theater announced on the social media platform Instagram this Monday.
For the fun of it, the theater subsequently also decided to post a funny joke to its marquee about the unfortunate situation with Amazon.
“Amazon called. Our marquee made when mad. All Melania shows cancelled. Show your support at Whole Foods instead :(,” the humorous marquee read.
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Besides ticking off Amazon, the theater also managed to tick off both Trump supporters and Trump haters. The Trump supporters reportedly thought the theater was dissing Melania, while the Trump haters resented the theater for playing the film in the first place.
“Also got, before then, countless emails and voicemails and Google / Yelp reviews (Google / Yelp took them down) wondering why the hell we had Melania here, or disdaining our disparaging of her,” the theater explained in its Instagram post.
In the end, Amazon’s decision to pull the film wound up being a blessing, says theater owner Jordan Perry.
Speaking with The Oregonian, he said that the extremely negative response from the public “paired with its milquetoast attendance here and most definitely not by our regulars” had him mulling cutting the film’s booking from two weeks down to one.
But before that could happen, Amazon called the booker that works with Perry’s theater and “relayed this message to him, that the studio was not happy and/or did not appreciate my take on ‘marketing’ their film to our own public.”
Writing in a blog post on the theater’s website, Perry revealed that he’d chosen to book “Melania” in the first place because he’d “thought doing so would be funny” and because “financially, the film marketplace this week and next were a desert.”
Instead of playing a typical horror movie, he thought it’d “be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show ’Melania’ here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighborhood cinema.”
Perry added that he himself wanted to see the movie — a fact that obviously hasn’t sat well with Portland’s army of liberals.
“Why did I want to see Melania? This seems to be the question without a reasonable answer for many messaging me. And their main gripe is that if it is a signpost of our times, it is an inescapably toxic one: that showing Melania is necessarily supporting her, this administration, and this administration’s policies. I don’t think this way! I think a lot of people don’t think this way!” he explained.
“For me, there was no dividing line between wanting to see it and showing it here. Am I trying to get people to vote one way or another? Not really! Am I hoping everyone commits to being open-minded, compassionate, and well-informed? Yeah, kinda! The marquee may seem mean, but my hope, always, is to, though momentarily fanning flames, ultimately lower the temperature,” Perry concluded.
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
V. Saxena is a staff writer with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University. Saxena also contributes to BizPac Review.
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