Controversial Trump film ’The Apprentice’ finds distributor, will open before election

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NEW YORK — After struggling to drum up interest following its Cannes Film Festival premiere, the young Donald Trump drama “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as the former president, has found a distributor that plans to release the film shortly before the election in November.

Briarcliff Entertainment will release “The Apprentice” on Oct. 11 in U.S. and Canadian theatres.

Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish Iranian filmmaker, had prioritized 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 also complained in early June on X that “for some reason certain power people in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”

Part of what dampened interest in “The Apprentice” was the potential threat of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, Trump’s reelection campaign spokesperson, Steven 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 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, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign,” 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 winner “Spotlight.”