(Headline USA) 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 Oct. 11 in U.S. and Canadian theaters, just weeks before Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 5.
That effectively makes it a de-facto campaign donation from Briarcliff founder and CEO Tom Ortenberg, who already has made at least 250 donations to Democrats in the current 2023-2024 election cycle alone. That includes more than $6,500 this year to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign according to records from the Federal Election Commission.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, called the film’s release “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November” in a statement Friday.
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung said.
Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish Iranian filmmaker, had prioritized getting The Apprentice into theaters before voters head to the polls. After larger studios and film distributors opted not to bid on the film, Abbasi complained in early June on X that “for some reason certain power people in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”
We have a new proposition for you. Its not a fucking sequel nor is it a fucking remake. Its called #The_Apprentice and for some reason certain power people in your country don’t want you to see it!!! https://t.co/EMoptrEqCP
— Ali Abbasi (@_aliabbasi_) June 3, 2024
Part of what dampened interest in The Apprentice was the potential threat of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, 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 legendary defense 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.
Trump offered an elegant eulogy of his first wife after her shocking 2022 death from blunt force trauma following a fall down the stairs.
While Trump may have shown fearlessness when confronted by an assassin’s bullet, those close to him have recounted that Ivana’s passing was one of the few times the ice-veined GOP leader has appeared to be emotionally distraught.
Nonetheless, Abbasi has claimed Trump might not dislike the movie, while unabashedly using his two-hour propaganda piece as a way to get the former president’s attention.
“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.
Ortenberg has a long history of pushing leftist cinematic revisionism, including Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 while at Lionsgate. He was also chief executive of Open Road, which backed the best picture Oscar winner Spotlight.
Briarcliff Entertainment previously released 2022’s Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down, documenting the wife of current Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., who was reportedly Barack Obama’s top choice to be Harris’s running mate.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
