The Apprentice – a movie telling the story of Donald Trump – can’t find a US distributor, and director Ali Abbasi has a few words about that.
Off the back of its debut at the Cannes Film Festival, director Ali Abbasi’s new film – The Apprentice – has been selling around the world. Here in the UK, it was quickly picked up by Studiocanal, who will be releasing the movie later this year. But in America, no distributor has acquired the movie, either for streaming or theatrical release.
The subject matter of the film concerns recently-convicted felon and former President of the United States, Donald Trump. Sebastian Stan stars as Trump in the film, with Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan also in the cast. Gabriel Sherman wrote the script, and Ali Abbasi directs.
The subject matter isn’t going down well with the Donald Trump fanbase, telling the story of his time in New York during the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, a scene of sexual assault is reportedly the subject of a potential lawsuit from the Trump campaign, although as this is being written, nothing has been filed.
But then also as this is being written, no American company is putting the film out. A mixture of reasons are likely. With Trump likely to win the US Presidential election this year, whichever distributor releases the feel inevitably feels retribution from clearly a very rational man. Furthermore, there’s the straight division in America too. Get on the wrong side of a certain subset of Donald Trump supporters, and again, rationality is absolutely the response you’ll get.
Ali Abbasi has taken to his Twitter account to highlight the challenge facing his film. This Tweet contains fruity language…
You can find the original Twitter link for his post, here.
This isn’t looking like it’s resolving quickly, and if people in America want to see the movie of The Apprentice, then they may have to import it when it becomes available.
We’ll keep you posted as we hear more.
