Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ Sees Viewer Surge As ‘Melania’ Opens

The release of Amazon’s Melania documentary appears to have sparked an interest in other former first ladies.

Per Luminate, Netflix‘s Michelle Obama documentary Becoming saw a substantial rise in U.S. viewership over the weekend. The feature, which was released in May 2020, jumped 13,300% in total minutes viewed versus the weekend prior, putting up 47.5 million viewing minutes from January 30-February 1.

That’s compared to 354,000 total minutes watched from January 23-25, the measurement company says.

For context, that’s just over 480,000 total streaming views (defined as time spent viewing divided by runtime) last weekend. Compared to some of the monster numbers that Netflix puts up for its titles, it’s a drop in the bucket. However, it’s an incredibly significant boost from the hundreds or, on a few random days, few thousand views Becoming saw on any other day in January.

Interestingly, the jump seems to have began right as Melania debuted in theaters across the country. Luminate’s data shows that Becoming scored just under 1 million minutes viewed (roughly 9,500 views) on January 30 before soaring to 13.9M minutes viewed (about 140,000 views) on the 31st. February 1 saw the biggest single-day viewership with 32.7M views (a bit over 330,000 views). The next two days also saw some long-tail effects from this surge in interest with millions of minutes viewed on February 2-3.

Melania, from director Brett Ratner in his return to filmmaking after being accused of sexual misconduct by several women in 2017 (allegations which he has denied), had the biggest opening for a non-fiction feature in the last decade, grossing $7M in its debut weekend. The film spotlights First Lady Melania Trump in the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration last January. 

But while that’s above average for recent documentaries, it’s worth remembering it opened in 1,800 theaters, which gave it the opportunity to put up at least $30M. It’s hard to declare that a documentary that cost $40M to license and $35M to market a success with that kind of opening. As for how it’ll perform when it eventually lands on Amazon’s Prime Video? Time will tell.

Becoming, directed by Nadia Hallgren, is an intimate look into the life of former first lady Michelle Obama both before and after her husband spent eight years in the White House. It takes viewers behind the scenes on the Becoming book tour, a cultural phenomenon that included a stop at New York’s Barclay Center in front of 19,000 attendees. The book was published in 2018 by Crown and was that year’s bestselling book.