Why Did the Donald Trump Movie ‘The Apprentice’ Bomb?

In May, after I saw and reviewed the how-Donald-Trump-learned-to-be-Donald-Trump biopic “The Apprentice” at the Cannes Film Festival, I had dinner with a group of very sharp-minded film folks, and we all agreed that the movie, if treated with the right marketing savvy, had the potential to make a splash. A few days later, I woke up from that delusion and realized that it had been a case of festival fever.

It struck me that since we had been living — for eight years — in a state of perpetual Donald Trump overkill, a drama about Trump’s salad days, when he learned how to lie, cheat and steal from the shifty-eyed Roy Cohn, wasn’t a movie that was bound to set the world on fire. Who was the audience for it? Probably anti-Trump Democrats, who don’t, at this point, need a big-screen drama to confirm what they already know. Would Trump supporters go? Are you kidding? They would boycott it. Would “The Apprentice” draw swing voters and perhaps tilt them in the anti-Trump direction? That sounds like a mirage out of cloud cuckoo land, but it’s the sort of fantasy that people who make a film like this one tend to fall into.

“The Apprentice” is a movie that presents itself as incendiary, but as well-done as it is, it’s closer in spirit to an old made-for-TV movie. As a bomb-tossing cultural buzz film, it was probably always destined to be a tempest in a teapot. But then something took place, in connection with it, that really was quite dramatic.

After generating its share of Cannes buzz, the movie couldn’t find a distributor. No one wanted to touch it. The Trump campaign made legal threats against the film, centering on a scene of sexual assault (an accusation that was denied in 2015 by Ivana Trump). And this created a ripple effect. Yet it wasn’t just the matter of a potential lawsuit. Back in May and June, the fear had already begun to coalesce that Trump would be the next president (Joe Biden getting kicked out of the race was, at this point, not even a gleam in the Democratic establishment’s eye), and the distributors were scared of recrimination. What if Trump did become president? What would he do to them?

This was a deeply chilling phenomenon to behold. I have no great investment in “The Apprentice,” a movie I liked but didn’t love (I thought that despite its entertaining and perceptive qualities, it never succeeded in penetrating Trump’s mystery). But after all the bullshit and fear that I have ever witnessed in the movie industry (fear of failure, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of getting into trouble for elevating art over formula and commerce), I had never seen anything quite like this. Simply put: People were already thinking and acting as if they were living under an authoritarian regime.

“The Apprentice” saga had a “happy ending,” of course. The film was finally bought by Briarcliff Entertainment, the maverick company founded by the highly regarded Tom Ortenberg. This weekend, it opened on 1,740 screens — a valiant effort, to be sure, though it still bombed, with a lackluster take of $1.58 million. What if they threw a movie party showcasing the young Donald Trump’s transgressions and nobody came?

It must be said that Sebastian Stan’s performance as Trump is incredibly good, at times uncanny. He gets the stiff body language, along with the airy charisma of Trump when he was smooth and suave and handsome enough to be compared to Robert Redford. And if you’re one of those people who’s fascinated by Roy Cohn, with his devil-incarnate mystique (in the movie, he’s a singular snake who links the backroom corruption of the old world to the hall-of-mirrors corruption of the budding Trump media world), Jeremy Strong’s performance as Cohn — homicidal eyes, machine-gun mouth, the way he breathes power — is the most compelling thing in the movie.

Really, though, with the election looming and the fate of America hanging in the balance, what could be more superficially relevant — and less actually relevant — than a movie like “The Apprentice”? The film is supposed to be a study of how Donald Trump came into his ruthless behavior. But while the Trump the movie shows us is unscrupulous and disloyal, nothing he does can hold a candle to the danger he now poses with every election denial, every promise to continue his reign as an agent of chaos. And that threat is incarnated in the fact that “The Apprentice” almost wasn’t released. You might say that I’m quibbling, since the movie played wide this weekend. You might say that the system, in the end, worked. However, the fact that everyone in mainstream Hollywood was scared to touch “The Apprentice” should tell you something. This wasn’t simply an anomaly. Right now, it feels like it could be an ominous preview of coming attractions.