On Friday morning, readers of the New York Times were presented with a foreboding headline: “The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie.”
For the unfamiliar, the film in question, The Apprentice, is a drama/thriller about the relationship between Roy Cohn and a younger Donald Trump as he pursues glamour and riches in 1970s New York, becoming progressively amoral and self-obsessed in the process.
Succession’s Jeremy Strong plays Cohn, Sebastian Stan plays Donald and the film’s most controversial scene involves the now former president raping his first wife, Ivana. (She accused him of “violating” her in her 1989 divorce deposition, only to recant this in 2015.)
The writer of the New York Times piece, Michelle Goldberg, lavishly praised the film — which I haven’t seen but am looking forward to — and though you may question her neutrality, the critical consensus is that the film is good if messy and paints Trump as a more complex figure than you might expect. Some of the most terminally online anti-Trump people will probably hate it for this — “you can’t humanize a monster!” and so forth — just as others will love it.
But — as Goldberg underlines — Americans may not be able to see it before the election. Distribution rights have been sold to foreign markets — from Japan and Canada to my home of Great Britain — but no American company has yet signed a deal to pick it up for either a cinema or streaming release. And that has Goldberg freaked out.
In her telling, this is but the latest example of censorship and intimidated silence in TrumpsAmericaTM and a preview for the years to come should he win re-election.
As she writes:
It’s common to read about movies that are shown in most of the world but not released in, say, Russia or more often China. Should The Apprentice end up widely available globally but not for political reasons in the United States, it will be a sign of democratic decay as well as an augur of greater self-censorship to come.
There’s only one problem: there’s no evidence to support the case that this is why the film hasn’t been picked up.
The Trump team has sent meaningless cease-and-desist letters, but aside from Hollywood speculation and the words of its investors (who are desperate to sell it), there’s no evidence that this is why the film hasn’t been picked up.
LA film executives aren’t that concerned with the MAGA base, and the film’s main investor, the pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder, has to approve any distribution sale and hasn’t interfered with its international distribution. In fact, the former Washington Commanders owner’s production company, Kinematics, has been most aggressively supporting the release of the film in the press.
Another theory is that studios that may merge or sell in the coming years worry about antitrust attention. By this argument, they fear picking up this film would put a target on them from regulators in a potential Trump government. This is pretty silly as the first Trump administration did little on antitrust whereas Lina Khan’s FTC has been unprecedentedly aggressive. If they want a merger, then a Trump win is in their self-interest whether they buy this film or not.
Also of note: Snyder is willing to finance controversial films. Kinematics previously produced The Scary of Sixty-First written, starring and directed by Red Scare co-host (and Succession actress) Dasha Nekrasova. Set in an apartment once supposedly owned by Jeffrey Epstein, the film includes scenes where she self-pleasures to photos of Prince Andrew and asks her boyfriend during sex to pretend they’re on the Lolita Express and treat her like a thirteen-year-old. It’s a pretty good film.
The reality is that The Apprentice — despite being written by salacious Vanity Fair reporter Gabriel Sherman — is probably struggling to get distribution for financial reasons rather than political ones; 2024 has been one of the worst years for the American box office, with even horror films flopping, and political films are almost never successful.
2017’s Chappaquiddick flopped commercially despite being a great film; so did 2018’s The Front Runner; and so did Vice, which released the same year. Despite having big stars, a famous director in Adam McKay and a big marketing push, it underperformed at the box office and never made up the shortfall on streaming. It’s the most notable political film in a decade and to this day has never turned a profit.
Nobody knows the budget for The Apprentice, but my guess is they spent too much money on it, expecting they would easily be able to sell to the US market in an election year, but can’t and aren’t getting high enough distribution offers to make it worthwhile.
If it got rave reviews, then a streaming service would probably have taken a bet on The Apprentice, but “mixed” isn’t enough, and it’s not likely to be in the Oscars conversation. And even that isn’t a guarantee these days.
Small Things Like These is Cillian Murphy’s first film since Oppenheimer and struggled to get US distribution; and The Outrun and La Concina are two of the leading 2025 Oscar contenders, and neither have US distribution yet.
Also: Goldberg notes that it “was received with an extended standing ovation… when it premiered at Cannes last month,” but literally every film gets that. The Cannes standing ovation is a participation trophy.
The Apprentice then is yet another adult-focused, dark, prestigious indie drama that’s struggling to get US distribution; but much like its leading character, it’s getting attention by falsely crying, “I’m being censored, the game is rigged.”
Trump’s doing it to turn out his base. The producers of The Apprentice seem to be doing it in hopes that a streaming service will see distribution as a sign of their support for artistic courage, so hand them a fat check.
