After struggling to drum up interest following its Cannes Film Festival premiere, The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump, has found a distributor that plans to release the film shortly before the election in November. Briarcliff Entertainment will release The Apprentice on October, 11 in U.S. and Canadian theaters.
Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish-Iranian filmmaker, had prioritized getting The Apprentice into theatres before voters headed to the polls. After larger studios and film distributors opted not to bid on the film, Abbasi also complained in early June on X that "for some reason, certain power people in your country don't want you to see it!!!”
Part of what dampened interest in The Apprentice was the potential threat of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, Trump's reelection campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, called the movie “pure fiction” and said the Trump team would file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
The Apprentice chronicles Trump's rise to power in New York real estate under the tutelage of defence attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong). Late in the movie, Trump is depicted raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova ). In Ivana Trump's 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn't mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.
Abbasi has argued Trump might not dislike the movie. “I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that's interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign,” Abbasi said in May.
A message sent to Trump's campaign for comment was not immediately returned. Briarcliff Entertainment has released films including the 2022 documentary Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down and the Liam Neeson thriller Memory. The indie distributor is run by Tom Ortenberg, who at Lionsgate helped released Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 and as chief executive of Open Road backed the best-picture winner Spotlight.
