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.

The Wrap – ‘The Apprentice’ Producer James Shani to Lead Group That Buys Out Pro-Trump Investor’s Stake | Exclusive

James Shani, who is an executive producer on the Donald Trump biopic “The Apprentice” that debuted at Cannes earlier this year, is leading the group that will buy out Dan Snyder’s stake in the controversial film directed by Ali Abbasi, TheWrap has exclusively learned. The move will pave the way for the film to secure U.S. distribution after Snyder, a staunch conservative, wanted out of the movie.

According to insiders, the producers and Snyder are working to settle in the $6 million-$7 million range, and if there is no agreement this week, the film’s producers are confident in their own legal recourse to give the film a path towards release.

The $7 million is coming from existing individual investors including Shani and Scythia Productions. Upon settlement, the producers will enter into a distribution agreement with Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment targeting a wide release before the election.

Negotiations to buy out Snyder’s stake have been ongoing since Cannes. The buyout gives Ali Abbasi creative control of the film.

The film, starring Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, had languished without a U.S. distribution deal since debuting in May at the Cannes Film Festival to strong reviews. Snyder wanted out of the film — he was not among those who read the script and did not know how the project would portray Trump. The film features a much-discussed recreation sequence where Trump rapes his former wife Ivana (she later recanted the allegation). Snyder donated more than $1 million to Trump and his inaugural committee in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 reelection campaign.

CAA and WME jointly represent US sales and are in a rare moment of collaboration brokering the settlement.

Reps for the filmmakers did not immediately respond to The Wrap’s request for comment.

Shani previously came on board to produce the project which needed additional financing to finish principal photography.

“The Apprentice” was written by Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi. It takes a look into the the life and career of Trump (Stan) while working as a New York real estate during the 1970s and the ’80s. He was supported at the time by lawyer Roy Cohn (Strong). The cast also includes Maria Bakalova as Ivana and Martin Donovan as Trump’s father, Fred Trump.

Briarcliff Entertainment is run by Tom Ortenberg, who oversaw “The Dissident,” about the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, another film that Hollywood was afraid to distribute. Ortenberg also distributed “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Spotlight,” which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and “Nightcrawler.” The company is eyeing a wide theatrical release in the fall before the presidential election in November and is currently discussing dates.