Talk about campaign season. The Trump movie will make it to U.S. theaters before the presidential election … and in time to push for awards consideration. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Briarcliff Entertainment will theatrically release Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice on October 11, after the movie first plays at some fall film festivals. A “full-on” awards campaign is said to be planned to promote the biopic, which stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump opposite Jeremy Strong’s Roy Cohn. For a while, The Apprentice seemed like a potential tough sell, perhaps because Trump’s team threatened to file a lawsuit over it. The movie reportedly includes a scene where Trump rapes his wife Ivana, which he has denied doing (Ivana made the claim in a 1990 divorce deposition, but later said she had felt “violated” and hadn’t meant the word “rape” literally). Billionaire Dan Snyder, who helped fund the film through his production company Kinematics, allegedly also wanted to block its theatrical release after the Cannes Film Festival premiere made him realize that the former president wasn’t portrayed as positively as he expected. According to THR, an Apprentice producer later bought out Kinematics’ interest in the film.
Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung claimed in a Friday statement to the Associated Press that the film’s upcoming October release is akin to “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November.” Cheung described The Apprentice as “pure malicious defamation” that “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” and instead “belongs in a dumpster fire.” Granted, sometimes that’s exactly the kind of movie that the internet latches onto, but we’ll see.
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