The art of the CanCon deal: Inside the release of The Apprentice, a Trump biopic with homegrown roots

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The new Canadian co-production The Apprentice has experienced what can only be described as an unusual journey from production to premiere. Ever since the drama starring Sebastian Stan (Marvel’s Captain America films) and Jeremy Strong (HBO’s Succession) debuted at the Cannes Film Festival this past May, it has been the subject of furious headlines, attention-grabbing behind-the-scenes shifts, and release-date uncertainty, the latter of which comes to a head Thursday when the film makes Canadian landfall in Toronto.

But that is what happens when you make a movie dramatizing the life of Donald Trump.

Director Ali Abbasi’s dark drama casts Stan as Trump circa the 1970s and eighties, with Strong playing the real-estate mogul’s longtime fixer Roy Cohn and Maria Bakalova (Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) as Trump’s ex-wife Ivana. Shortly after the film premiered in Cannes, where critics highlighted a scene of sexual violence between Donald and Ivana, Trump’s campaign communications chief Steven Cheung announced that a lawsuit was in the works over the film’s “blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

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While no such litigation has since emerged, one of the production companies that invested in the film – Kinematics, backed by billionaire Trump supporter Dan Snyder – this week sold off its stake in the film over what it calls “creative differences.”

And now, The Apprentice will make its long-awaited Canadian debut on the opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival – sort of.

After holding a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival this past weekend, The Apprentice will privately screen Thursday night in Toronto for select press and industry players, just around the corner from TIFF’s opening-night festivities. The film will then make its official Canadian premiere Sept. 15 at the Atlantic International Film Festival in Halifax, before opening in Canadian theatres Oct. 11 via domestic distributor Mongrel Media. The roll-out affords the production a crucial window of box-office exposure for the film before the U.S. presidential election Nov. 5.

“Every movie has the right moment to be released, but this movie has been in the works for roughly seven years, so the timing is not particularly pre-planned,” says Daniel Beckerman, one of the film’s producers and head of the Toronto-based company Scythia Films. The film, a Canada/Denmark/Ireland co-production, was shot in and around Toronto late last year.

“Not to get all woo-woo about it, but it’s the right time for this movie,” Beckerman adds. “People of all political persuasions are going to be surprised by how they feel when watching the movie. I think it’s safe to say that it’s going to subvert expectations for almost everybody.”

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The movie’s distribution strategy is also upending norms, with producers this week launching a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, to “help us promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that Corporate America is scared to show you.” (The film hits U.S. theatres via distributor Briarcliff Entertainment the same day that it’s released in Canada.)

By offering Kickstarter donors exclusive perks, such as early access to the film on streaming, The Apprentice team is borrowing a page from the playbook followed by the makers of last year’s surprise hit Sound of Freedom, which targeted a specifically conservative base of moviegoers.

“They are very different movies with very different perspectives, but there is something that they have in common – they don’t fit neatly into a box, and there isn’t a glide path in terms of distribution for them,” says Beckerman. “There’s an industrial problem of how to get movies like this to audiences. Their team had success, and we’re working on that in our own particular way.”