NEW YORK (AP) — After struggling to generate interest following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the drama about Donald Trump, “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as the former president, has found a distributor who plans to release the film shortly before the November elections.
Briarcliff Entertainment will release "The Apprentice" on October 11 in theaters in the United States and Canada, just a few weeks before Americans cast their votes on November 5.
Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi had prioritized bringing "The Apprentice" to theaters before voters went to the polls. After major studios and film distributors chose not to bid for the film, Abbasi complained in early June to X, "for some reason, certain powerful people in your country don't want you to see it!" he wrote.
Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, described the premiere of the film as "electoral interference by the Hollywood elites right before November" in a statement released on Friday.
"Cheung said, 'This 'film' is pure malicious defamation, it should never see the light of day, and it doesn't even deserve a place in the DVD section of a bargain bin in a soon-to-close discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.'"
Part of what decreased interest in "The Apprentice" was the potential threat of legal action. After its premiere at Cannes in May, Trump's re-election campaign spokesperson, Steven Cheung, called the film "pure fiction" and stated that Trump's team would file a lawsuit "to address the blatantly false claims of these fake filmmakers."
"The Apprentice" tells the story of Trump's rise to power in the New York real estate sector under the guidance of defense attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong).
At the end of the movie, Trump is depicted as raping his wife, Ivana Trump (portrayed by Maria Bakalova). In Ivana Trump's divorce statement in 1990, she claimed that Trump raped her. Trump denied the accusation and Ivana Trump later said that she did not mean it literally, but that she had felt violated.
Abbasi had said that Trump might not like the movie.
"I would offer to go see him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and chat afterwards, if that is interesting to someone in the Trump campaign," Abbasi said in May.
Briarcliff Entertainment has released films such as the 2022 documentary "Gabby Giffords Won't Back Down" 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 supported the Oscar-winning Best Picture "Spotlight".