Well, it looks like The Apprentice has officially been fired by moviegoers across the country.
This so-called “biopic” of Donald Trump, which took the bold (and frankly ridiculous) step of portraying a young Trump as a rapist, crashed and burned at the box office with an embarrassing opening weekend gross of just $1.5 million. That’s right—a movie that got endless free publicity from the mainstream media only managed to scrape together an average of $862 per screen. With 1,740 screens showing the movie, that boils down to about five people per showing. Ouch.
Hollywood might have rolled out the red carpet for The Apprentice, but it looks like America wasn’t buying what they were selling. After all, it’s not exactly a stretch to say that most people aren’t itching to watch a hit piece designed to smear a former president just before an election. You’d think that with the backing of The New York Times, CNN, and MSNBC, this film would be packing theaters. But instead, the public gave it a big, collective “no thanks.”
Let’s be clear: this movie was rejected long before it hit theaters. Major studios and streamers didn’t want to touch The Apprentice with a ten-foot pole. It was only after most of Hollywood said “no thanks” that Briarcliff Entertainment swooped in at the last minute to distribute the film—and even they needed a crowdsourcing campaign just to cover distribution costs. So much for that Hollywood magic.
Art of the distribution deal. https://t.co/dQqVGdr7XN
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) August 30, 2024
The film, directed by Ali Abbasi, had its splashy premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, where Abbasi used his platform to bash Trump as a “fascist.” And while the left-wing media fawned over the movie, audiences just didn’t care. It turns out that most people don’t want to see Donald Trump fictionalized as a villain straight out of a Hollywood fever dream. And for good reason. One particularly outrageous scene has Trump raping his wife, Ivanka, a claim she herself has publicly denied. It’s the kind of absurdity that only plays well in a room full of Hollywood elites, not in the real world.
AtLeastYouTried.gif https://t.co/zCZQtMnmuq
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 26, 2024
Even with Sebastian Stan playing Trump and Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn as some kind of Luciferian mentor, The Apprentice couldn’t sell tickets. Maybe the filmmakers thought they were telling a hard-hitting story of Trump’s rise in the 1970s and 80s, but audiences clearly didn’t buy into this cartoonish version of events. The box office numbers are proof that people are tired of these politically charged hit pieces masquerading as “entertainment.”
The Apprentice has been rejected by the very public it was trying to sway. While Hollywood and the media might still be obsessed with taking down Trump, it seems that most Americans have already changed the channel.
