After struggling to gain traction following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Donald Trump drama The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as the former president, has found a distributor that plans to release it shortly before the November election.
Briarcliff Entertainment will release The Apprentice in theaters in the United States and Canada on October 11.
Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi prioritized the release of “The Disciple” in theaters before voters went to the polls. After major studios and distributors decided not to bid on the film, Abbasi complained to X in early June that “for some reason, the powerful 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 campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung called the film “pure fiction” and said the Trump team would file a lawsuit “to address the false claims made by these fake filmmakers.”
“The Apprentice” follows Trump’s rise to power in New York’s real estate industry under the tutelage of defense attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
At the end of the film, Trump describes raping his wife Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce filing, she claimed that Trump had raped her. Trump denied the allegation, and Ivana Trump later said that she did not mean it literally, but that she felt raped.
Abbasi said Trump might not like the film.
“I offer to watch it anywhere and discuss the context of the film, the screening and the conversation afterwards if it is of interest to anyone in the Trump campaign,” Abbasi said in May.
Briarcliff Entertainment has produced films including the 2022 Gabby Giffords documentary Won’t Go Back and the Liam Neeson thriller Memory. The independent distributor is led 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.”
