Deadline

As Deadline told you would happen, tonight at 10 PM is a lock for the US debut of the hot button film The Apprentice, about the formative growth of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as mentored by Roy Cohn. The film has been quietly placed on the Telluride roster, and now they’ve locked the Galaxy Theater.

This comes after months of turmoil that followed the film’s Cannes premiere. Scripted by Gabriel Sherman, the film stars Sebastian Stan as young Donald Trump in the ’70s as he — according to the description furnished by Telluride — “falls under the sway of the demonic lawyer and power broker Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). In following Trump as he learns the ways of celebrity and power in the New York of the ’70s, director Ali Abbasi (Border, The Holy Spider) evokes the gritty documentary style of directors like Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin. And he keeps us riveted to the surprisingly poignant father-and-son dynamic, beautifully enacted by Stan and Strong, that seems fortified by greed, insecurity and endless need.” Maria Bakalova plays Trump’s wife Ivana Trump, and one of the scenes the Trump camp has complained about is a scene showing Trump raping his estranged wife.

There are several buzz films on the schedule tonight, including Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night about the chaos that went into the premiere of the NBC staple Saturday Night Live. But buckle up for The Apprentice. Abbas, Stan, Strong, Amy Baer and Sherman will be there. The film gets released before the elections by Briarcliff, likely on October 11 with international rollout to follow.

Vulture

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. A source told Vulture that The Apprentice executive producer James Shani, whose company Rich Spirit is among the film’s backers, acquired the film from Kinematics and partnered with Briarcliff.

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.