Billionaire Dan Snyder is reportedly blocking the domestic release The Apprentice, the controversial biopic of former President Donald Trump that portrays the young Trump as a rapist.
Dan Snyder — the former owner of the Washington Redskins (now Commanders) and a supporter of Trump — was an indirect investor in The Apprentice and is now preventing the movie’s production company from inking a deal with Briarcliff Entertainment, the specialty distribution label behind such recent titles as Luc Besson’s Dogman and the Liam Neeson-starrer Marlowe.
The latest development was reported by Puck News and The Daily Beast.
Snyder reportedly has a financial stake in his son-in-law Mark Rapaport’s production company, Kinematics, which was the one of the financiers of The Apprentice. This apparently gives Snyder the ability to veto any domestic distribution deal.
As Breitbart News reported, The Apprentice failed to find a U.S. distributor at the Cannes Film Festival last month. Following the in-competition premiere, Trump’s campaign threatened to sue the filmmakers.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.”
He also called the film “malicious defamation.”
Lawyers for Trump also sent a cease-and-desist letter to The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, warning them against pursuing a distribution deal.
The Apprentice was independently financed and produced outside the Hollywood studio system — mostly through overseas companies as well as some domestic investors.
The movie shows Trump (played by actor Sebastian Stan) raping his first wife, Ivana Trump. It also portrays Donald Trump undergoing plastic surgery and liposuction.
The late Ivana Trump denied that her then-husband ever raped her.
Also starring in the movie is Succession actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Trump mentor Roy Cohn.
The Apprentice director Ali Abbasi said he hopes the movie will be released before the November presidential election, preferably during the debates.
But even the left-wing The Daily Beast acknowledged that the movie would have a negligible impact on voters.
“This is not Barbenheimer,” an unnamed source told the outlet. “The idea that a movie would have any impact on the 2024 election is laughable.”
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