The Apprentice movie set for release before US presidential election

By Jake Coyle, Associated Press

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 US and Canadian theatres, just weeks before Americans cast their ballots on November 5th.

Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish Iranian filmmaker, had prioritised getting The Apprentice into theatres 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”.

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, in a statement on Friday called the film’s release “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November”.

“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,” Mr Cheung said.

Part of what dampened interest in The Apprentice was the potential threat of legal action.

After its Cannes premiere in May, Mr 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 Mr 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, Mr Trump is depicted raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova).

In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Mr Trump raped her. Mr Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she did not mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.

Mr Abbasi has argued Mr 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,” Mr 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 released Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and as chief executive of Open Road backed the best picture Oscar winner Spotlight.