The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s hot-button film about the young Donald Trump, has been acquired by Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment for a pre-election U.S. release on Oct. 11, as well as an awards push, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. The film was written by Vanity Fair’s longtime Trump chronicler Gabriel Sherman and stars Sebastian Stan as the future president and Jeremy Strong as his one-time consigliere Roy Cohn.
The Trump “origin story” premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20, and quickly proved to be a bit of a hot potato. Dan Snyder, the pro-Trump billionaire whose Kinematics company put up equity for the film against domestic rights, reportedly was displeased with the film’s depiction of Trump and sought to block its release; and the Trump campaign issued legal threats to potential distributors.
In the end, THR has learned, Kinematics’ interest in the film was bought out, allowing the Briarcliff deal to move forward.
In the relatively brief period between now and Oct. 11, The Apprentice will begin appearing at some fall film festivals, and a full-on awards campaign — something with which Ortenberg is very familiar from his days at Lionsgate overseeing Crash and at Open Road overseeing Spotlight, both of which won the best picture Oscar — is already being organized.
“What Abassi’s film reveals most of all is the extent to which the toxicity that’s now an inescapable part of our contemporary reality was shaped by the unholy alliance between two men half a century ago,” THR’s David Rooney opined in his Cannes review of the film, which received largely positive reviews across the board and now stands at 77 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.
