Boy, y'all must really like Sebastian Stan, huh?
That's the only logical takeaway we can get from news that the just-launched Kickstarter campaign for Stan's new movie The Apprentice—in which the Captain America favorite plays Donald Trump, opposite Succession's Jeremy Strong as mentor Roy Cohn—hit its funding goals in less than a day. It's certainly not because the Trump campaign has basically given massive amounts of free advertisement and a sheen of righteous political zeal to Ali Abbasi's movie, which has been hit with accusations of election interference and lawsuit threats as it slowly makes the festival rounds, with it set to make a surprise appearance at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday night.
Distributor Briarcliff Entertainment launched the Kickstarter on Tuesday, right around the time it became official that funding partner Kinematics had pulled out of the picture, reportedly because financial backer Dan Snyder had thought he was funding a pro-Trump movie, but, uh, no. From reviews out of its Cannes debut, the film is generally unflattering toward its central figure, but especial attention has paid to a scene where Stan's Trump rapes his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova), a scene based on depositions from the couples' divorce proceedings that Ivana later recanted. Anyway, Snyder and Kinematics pulled their money from the film's aimed-at October 2024 release, and so producers instead turned to The People.
Who've come out in force, to the tune of more than 2,000 backers, and $145,000, just one day into the campaign. The language surrounding the campaign is pretty hyped-up—with references to giving the film's producers money to expand distribution as "signing a petition" to get the film released, and a lot of stuff about empowering the people in the face of both political pressure and media complacency. In practicalities, most people are shelling out at the $25 level, which gets you streaming access to the movie whenever it actually gets its release; nobody, meanwhile, has decided to pony up the $3,500 that gets you one of three of Stan's toupees from filming, which are distressingly labeled "Young Donnie," "Power Donald," and "Last Stage Don." The Kickstarter is set to run through September 29, provided it doesn't get cease-and-desisted into the dust in the meantime.
