One Ticket to Nowhere

One Ticket to Nowhere
Photo by Donald Teel / Unsplash

The Melania movie sold one ticket in the UK. One. A lone cinema seat briefly warmed by what history will record as either curiosity, irony, or a scheduling error. Somewhere, a spreadsheet mistook this for “market engagement”.

This was never really a film. It was a prestige-shaped offering, a glossy artefact of elite back-scratching, widely read as a soft bribe from Amazon and Jeff Bezos: money and visibility gently placed at the feet of political power, just in case. Not art, not culture, but a transactional nod dressed up as cinema. The kind of project that exists because it can, not because anyone asked for it.

The audience response was refreshingly honest. Faced with a billionaire-sanctioned fairytale about proximity to authoritarian glamour, the public opted out. No outrage, no culture war, no think pieces required. Just indifference. In a system that runs on attention, indifference is lethal.

There is something quietly hopeful about this. When even unlimited money, platform power, and elite favour can only sell a single ticket, it suggests that propaganda still has limits, and that people, when given the choice, will sometimes choose nothing at all.

We are keeping this short, nobody wants to read this anyways.

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