It’s a pretty big stretch to think that classically liberal Hollywood would ever make a movie that was a flattering portrayal of Donald Trump. Maybe because it’s an indie film, billionaire investor Dan Snyder (former owner of the Washington Commanders) thought The Apprentice might turn against the tide of the entertainment industry’s typical values. There’s been no press ahead of the Cannes Film Festival premiere for The Apprentice, starring Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, and Maria Bakalova, so we don’t know exactly what the movie is like. But it’s definitely not pro-Trump, and Snyder is reportedly pissed.
According to Variety, Snyder—who is a friend of the former president and a major donor to his previous campaigns—invested money in the movie via production company Kinematics because he thought it would be nice to his pal. When he saw a cut of the movie in February, he was allegedly furious and has been trying to get “multiple aspects” of the movie changed. There are even supposedly lawyers involved sending the filmmakers cease and desists, though Kinematics president Emanuel Nuñez denied that Snyder was pulling strings behind the scenes in a statement to the outlet: “All creative and business decisions involving The Apprentice have always been and continue to be solely made by Kinematics. Mark and I run our company without the involvement of any other third parties.” (Note that Nuñez didn’t deny there are legal issues going on behind the scenes.)
Because nobody knows much about the movie, it’s unclear what a “flattering” portrayal would’ve really entailed, at least in Snyder’s view. Trump’s friends and supporters seem to like him because he’s an asshole and a bully, so it’s hard to imagine Snyder was looking for some sanitized version of his story where he came across sweet and saintly. Maybe the issue is with the film’s focus on Trump’s (Stan) relationship with Roy Cohn (Strong), which could make the businessman-turned-politician look like an easily manipulated puppet. (That’s just speculation. We haven’t seen the movie.) A source told Variety that the film features a “violent” and “uncomfortable” scene of Trump sexually assaulting his wife Ivana (Bakalova), something that Ivana claimed in a divorce deposition but later recanted. Though none of the many public sexual assault allegations prevented Trump from being elected, it’s easy to imagine a friend of his would try to get this excised from his movie.
Perhaps that’s the real reason Snyder invested in the film—to get some measure of control on the messaging of a movie about a candidate coming out in an election year. It just seems impossibly naive that Snyder wouldn’t expect the film to show Trump in a negative light, especially for a man described as a “fixture at the festival where he socializes with other billionaires on his yacht.” For a guy that cozy with the film industry, he had to see the anti-Trump writing on the wall, right? Kinematics can’t kill the film because it doesn’t own the copyright, but it does have a say in the sales, so it’ll be interesting to see where this one goes.