Not so fast.
Despite prior reporting, it looks like Ali Abassi’s “The Apprentice” hasn’t been bought by Briarcliffe Entertainment after all. It turns out that one of the film’s producers, Daniel Snyder, a major Trump donor, is blocking the deal (via The Washington Post).
Kinematics, which is Snyder’s production company, and one of the main financial backers of the film, isn’t happy with the rape scene in the film which depicts Donald Trump forcefully having sex with his then-wife Ivana Trump.
In May, Variety had reported that Snyder, who is a friend of Trump’s, first saw a cut of the film in February and was absolutely furious. This didn’t stop the film from premiering at Cannes where it was met with, mostly, positive reviews.
According to her 1993 autobiography “Lost Tycoon,” Ivana made the rape accusation in a divorce court statement, but later clarified her earlier words, noting that she did not mean them in “a literal or criminal sense,” adding she “just felt violated” at the time.
Almost every Hollywood studio declined to distribute “The Apprentice,” but when producers finally thought they had secured an interested U.S. partner, Briarcliff, Snyder supposedly vetoed the deal. The Washington Post is saying that the deal has “stalled.” Their sources claim that Snyder, 59, is the cause for the hold up.
However, the paper cites another anonymous source, close to Kinematics, who claims the deal was stalled for financial reasons, rather than any disagreement with the politics in the film. Briarcliffe Entertainment is said to have offered $5M to buy the film which had a production budget of $20M.