As the US election inexorably approaches, the most talked-about film of the year has flopped. The much-discussed, much-excoriated biography of the young Donald Trump, The Apprentice, has made a mere $1.6 million on its opening weekend in the United States, ranking 10th and finishing below such pictures as Terrifier 3, Joker: Folie à Deux and, perhaps most embarrassingly, the re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, a 30-year old film that most of its audience could have seen via a streaming service if they had so wished.
Although Ali Abbasi’s film was not made on a large budget – $16 million is what the catering would probably cost on its star Sebastian Stan’s next major picture, the Marvel epic Thunderbolts – it is still likely to end its theatrical run as a considerable flop. It certainly won’t make any material difference to the election.
It was an altogether different story when the film premiered at Cannes earlier this year. Then, Trump expected to face Biden at the ballot boxes this November, and the incumbent president was widely regarded as a severely flawed opponent whose rumoured incipient dementia would have made him relatively easy to defeat. Yet the circumstances under which the film premiered were an example of bait-and-switch that its subject must surely have ruefully admired.
It was funded by Dan Snyder, an American billionaire businessman who had put up the cost for The Apprentice wrongly believing that it would be a flattering portrait of his friend. When he saw the completed picture, Snyder threw the hissy fit to end all hissy fits, ensuring that legal letters flew in all directions bearing the words “cease and desist”. It was even rumoured that the film, which received largely admiring critical reviews when it premiered, would be canned altogether. Political films are always a hard sell in any market, but when they come this laden with controversy, they verge on toxic.
The picture found its Hollywood ending of sorts when Briarcliff Entertainment, run by the businessman Tom Ortenberg, stepped in to buy the distribution rights. He cut it fine, only being able to purchase the rights at the end of August, ahead of its release on October 11. The time crunch made it difficult to invest in an advertising campaign that would have drawn curious cinemagoers into theatres.
When interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter as to the circumstances behind his acquisition, Ortenberg said: “I heard about the cease and desist letter from the Trump campaign. I read about the thunderous reception the film received at Cannes both from critics and audiences. I just assumed it would be way too expensive for me to acquire. Then, in the couple of days that followed its world premiere, I started reading stories about how not just bigger studios but also some of the independent elites, were running away from the picture, not having anything to do with finances or artistic merit but strictly based on cowardice.”
This was fighting talk as far as Ortenberg was concerned. After seeing and approving of the picture, he made a distribution offer, but was unable to, in his words, “actually consummate a deal for domestic distribution” until the negotiation between filmmakers and financiers could be agreed. In other words, Snyder was torn between his desire to see the film jettisoned altogether, and, the businessman incarnate, wanting at least some of his money back. Therefore, after a great deal of negotiation, Briarcliff was allowed to release the film.
Ortenberg was under no illusions that it would be an immediate box office hit. “We look at this as a marathon, not a sprint,” he said. “It’s not about opening weekend, and it’s not about how many screens or this or that. It’s about the legacy of the film, which I think will be a strong one through awards season and beyond.” Yet this is not the Seventies or Eighties, where an independent-minded political drama such as this could have succeeded through word of mouth. In the new age of cinema, if you fail on the opening weekend, you’re dead in the water, not least because exhibitors will simply turn their screens over to other, more profitable pictures.
Ortenberg – who has also picked up the rights to another controversial project, the Jonathan Majors-starring Magazine Dreams – railed against his fellow distributors, none of whom were interested in releasing The Apprentice. “They’re cowards,” he said. “Many in the industry are afraid of repercussions should Trump win the election. And to me, that’s heartbreaking. I keep liking to think that we as an industry are better than that, and I keep getting reminded that we’re not.”
He may well be a partisan Democrat, and his intentions with the film may have been to throw a hand grenade into the already febrile political mix that exists across America at the moment. But had Ortenberg taken a step back, he might have wondered whether The Apprentice – its excellent reviews aside – was really the picture that anyone needed, or wanted, to watch right at this moment.
The film’s script, as written by Gabriel Sherman, was seen as one of Hollywood’s hottest properties when he wrote it in 2018, halfway through Trump’s first term. It was offered to many of the major directors working today, including Clint Eastwood and Paul Thomas Anderson, both of whom have form with small-p political dramas. Yet they both turned it down. “The producers of The Apprentice were having a difficult time finding the right director who would risk his career,” Abassi later said. “They had to assess the business risk.”
One problem was that there was an intrinsic debate about whether the film was a partisan attack on Trump, or an apolitical account of the early years of a controversial but important figure. At Cannes, Abassi – perhaps with tongue in cheek – called the film “completely non-partisan… I don’t necessarily think this is a movie he would dislike,” he said of Trump’s reaction. “I don’t think he’d necessarily like it, but I think he would be surprised.”
Interestingly, the film has attracted criticism from both the Left and the Right alike. Shirley Li wrote in The Atlantic that it was “a muddy exercise in Trumpology that never answers the biggest question it raises: What does chronicling Trump’s beginnings illuminate about one of the most documented and least mysterious men in recent American history?” It is also telling that the film is as much about Trump’s mentor, the character of Roy Cohn, as played by the excellent Jeremy Strong, as it is about Trump; Cohn, who was immortalised in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, was a closeted lawyer who became his protege’s political fixer before dying of Aids in 1986, lying to the last about the nature of his illness.
Strong has never been backwards in coming forwards with his opinions when being interviewed. “This is a Frankenstein movie,” he said recently. “They told us not to frame it like that, but let’s be honest. Cohn’s malign legacy is one of denial and that is what he passed on to Trump: this detestation of the world and a need to punish and act out with hatred.” This is hardly the non-partisan view that Abassi expressed.
Strong went on: “Part of the mess we are in is due to us demonising the other side and so it would be wildly irresponsible to make a movie about Trump that just vilifies him. It’s not bad to gain insight and empathy.” But it is hard not to feel the finished product is a highly accomplished but fundamentally biased account of how, in its view, a bad man became worse, rather than the more interesting and nuanced account of what turned a New York businessman into one of the most talked-about political figures in American history. (UK posters for the film trumpet a GQ review that calls it “A super-villain origin story” – so much for balance.)
And this, to a large extent, is the film’s undoing. Donald Trump is someone familiar to every single voter in the United States, partly because he has already served as President – for better or for worse, his record still attracts ferocious debate – and partly because he has a rare gift for self-publicity that his opponents have been unable to emulate. Love him or loathe him, it’s impossible to deny that he has a stand-up comic’s gift for timing and impact that Stan, for all the success of his portrayal, cannot come close to embodying on screen.
The Apprentice may have come out at the right time in terms of topicality, but it was also released at a moment when Trump is on television and in the newspapers every single day, almost relentlessly. If the kind of viewers who turned out in their millions for, say, Oppenheimer wanted to pay their money to be entertained and distracted for a couple of hours, it is likely that they would have chosen something that connoted either escapism or political history from a more distant period, rather than walking into something so redolent of current affairs.
Strong’s motivation for taking part in the film was simple, and laudable. He suggested that “the world is on fire, so I want to hold the mirror up to it. In this age of increasing noise, AI and digital life, art that has radical honesty is needed more than ever. I want to be part of that.” Ortenberg, likewise, should be commended for putting his cash where his principles are.
It may be that, whatever the result of the 2024 election, The Apprentice will eventually be viewed on its own terms as an accomplished and intriguing character study of two remarkable, deeply flawed men. Yet its theatrical failure is only likely to lead to fewer risk-taking pictures like this being made. It may well have been more successful as an HBO miniseries, or a Netflix one-and-done, and could have been of greater artistic interest if it had actors and filmmakers involved whose politics were more ambiguous than the card-carrying Democrats. “‘You are making a mistake, you are alienating half the country,’” Stan says he was told when he signed on to make the film. But he nonetheless considered the role a considerable challenge, and one that he rose to.
Still, the final question remains whether liberal Hollywood – with all of its predictable political views – could ever have made a truly representative biopic of Donald Trump, or if for them he will always be a bogeyman beyond compare. The Apprentice may nod in the former direction, but ultimately it lacks the boldness to go truly off-piste.
Abassi may look longingly at the recent Ronald Reagan biopic, starring Trump voters Dennis Quaid and Jon Voight, which has overcome predictably hostile reviews to make nearly $30 million at the box office so far: a sum that his film is unlikely to approach. As the forthcoming election may or may not prove, sometimes people are sick of being told that they are wrong and ignorant, and will vote with their money – or their ballot – in ways that the liberal elite may not be comfortable with.
