Ali Abbasi’s Trump Movie ‘The Apprentice’ Will Open in the U.S. Ahead of the Election
Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump movie “The Apprentice” starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn will get a chance to help shape the 2024 presidential election.
“The Apprentice” has been acquired for U.S. distribution by Briarcliff Entertainment, which plans to release it in theaters ahead of the election on October 11, IndieWire has learned.
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Abbasi’s film made its premiere in competition at Cannes to lukewarm reviews, even given the morbid-curiosity factor of seeing Trump’s rise to power — as well as it being an “Avengers” star who portrays the 45th president. In his review of “The Apprentice” out of Cannes, IndieWire critic David Ehrlich wrote that while the film generates an ounce of sympathy for Cohn and the “monster he helped create” in Trump, Trump as a character is too shallow to be dramatically interesting.
“Sometimes in broad strokes and sometimes with brutal specificity, ‘The Apprentice’ does what it can to dramatize how the student became — and surpassed — his teacher by too perfectly embodying all of his lessons,” Ehrlich wrote. “If those efforts aren’t even close to enough for this movie to shine a meaningful new light on the most overexposed man who’s ever lived (or his mentor), that’s largely because it can’t get around the fact that Trump is too base and pathological to be of much dramatic interest.”
Still, the movie was buzzy, but distribution remained complicated. Holding up the release plans was former Washington Commanders owner and pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder, who (through his company Kinematics) invested in the movie but tried to block its release due to the final cut’s not-Trump-friendly tone. THR, which first reported the news of the film’s sale, said that Snyder’s stake in the film has been bought out — that has paved the way for its release this fall.
When reached by IndieWire, Briarcliff Entertainment had no comment on this story.
It also didn’t help that the Trump campaign issued legal threats to distributors who sought to release the film, in part because it contains a disturbing sequence in which Stan-as-Trump rapes his first wife Ivana. The producers at the time defended the project as a “fair and balanced portrait of the former president” and encouraged everyone to see the film and decide for themselves.
“The Apprentice” specifically follows Trump in the late ’70s and early ’80s as he’s being coached by Cohn on his real-estate empire. For his mentorship, Cohn got pushed out. The film also stars Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, Martin Donovan as Fred Trump, and Catherine McNally as Mary Anne Trump.
Briarcliff is run by Tom Ortenberg; the distributor has also acquired Luc Besson’s “DogMan” and the SXSW darling “My Dead Friend Zoe,” among others films, this year.
James Shani’s Rich Spirit is among the film’s backers and helped acquire the film from Kinematics and is partnering with Briarcliff on the theatrical release. Other producers include Daniel Bekerman for Scythia Films, Jacob Jarek for Profile Pictures, Ruth Treacy and Julianne Forde for Tailored Films, and Abbasi and Louis Tisné for Film Institute.
Election Day is November 5.
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