Controversial Trump Film Will Open Before Election

After drawing little interest in its Cannes Film Festival premiere, The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump, now has a distributor that plans to release the film before the Nov. 5 election. Briarcliff Entertainment will release The Apprentice on Oct. 11 in US and Canadian theaters, the AP reports, just weeks before the presidential election. 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!!!"

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, in a statement Friday called the film's release "election interference by Hollywood elites right before November." He said, "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." Part of what dampened interest in The Apprentice was the potential of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, Cheung said the Trump team would file a lawsuit "to address the blatantly false assertions," per the AP.

The Apprentice chronicles Trump's rise to power in New York real estate under the tutelage of 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. Abbasi has argued 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," he said in May.

(More The Apprentice movie stories.)