Progressives who hoped The Apprentice might serve as an “October Surprise” that could harm Donald Trump’s chances in next month’s presidential election were sorely disappointed when the movie bombed in its theater debut.
The Apprentice, a negative take on Trump’s early years, opened to just $1.6 million over the weekend, roughly translating to less than 10 people in each showing at the 1,750 theaters that featured the movie.
To put that into perspective, Vindicating Trump earned more per theater when it opened last month, even though the Dinesh D’Souza pro-Trump movie is a documentary, and that genre typically does not fare nearly as well as narrative films like The Apprentice do.
For a more apples-to-apples comparison, Reagan, a narrative film about a different former president, Ronald Reagan, opened six weeks ago to $7.7 million, nearly five times more than The Apprentice.
The Apprentice was written by liberal journalist Gabriel Sherman and stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump; Maria Baklova as his former wife, Ivana Trump; and Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn, an attorney who is portrayed as the future president’s amoral mentor.
Trump is portrayed in The Apprentice as raping his first wife, Ivana, and attending a