NEW YORK– After struggling to generate interest after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump, has found a distributor who plans to release the film shortly before the November election to release.
Briarcliff Entertainment will release “The Apprentice” in U.S. and Canadian theaters on Oct. 11, just weeks before Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 5.
Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish-Iranian filmmaker, had made it a priority to get “The Apprentice” into theaters before voters went to the polls. After larger studios and film distributors opted not to bid on the film, Abbasi complained to X in early June that “for some reason certain people of power in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, in a statement Friday called the film’s release “election interference by Hollywood elites just before November.”
“This ‘movie’ is pure malicious slander, should never see the light of day and doesn’t even deserve a place in the direct-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-close discount film store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung said .
Part of what dampened interest in “The Apprentice” was the potential threat of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, Cheung called the film “pure fiction” and said the Trump team would file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false claims made by these so-called filmmakers.”
“The Apprentice” tells the story of Trump’s rise to power in New York real estate under the tutelage of attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong). Late in the film, Trump is depicted raping his wife Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce decree, she stated that Trump had raped her. Trump denied the accusation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but that she felt violated.
Abbasi has argued that Trump may not like the film.
“I would offer to meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the film, have a screening and a chat afterwards, if that would be of interest to someone in the Trump campaign,” Abbasi said in May .
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 release Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and, as CEO of Open Road, backed the Best Picture Oscar winner “Spotlight.”
