Kickstarter for Donald Trump's biopic The Apprentice exceeds $100K goal in one day amid ex-president's team threatening to sue filmmakers

Controversial Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice has become a much-talked-about topic these days. The first teaser of the Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi's movie was released recently. Earlier this week, the movie lost one of its significant financial backers, Kinematics.

This further led to the initiation of a Kickstarter fundraiser for the movie, which already exceeded its $100,000 goal in just a day. At the time of writing, the fundraiser reached about $160,458. The campaign's subhead mentioned:

"Help us promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that Corporate America is scared to show you."

Shortly after crossing such a huge target in a day, Abbasi posted on X (formerly Twitter):

"Wow we crushed our kickstarter target in one day! Apparently people DO want to see #TheApprentice in cinemas 🙌."

The Independent reported on September 5, that the financier exited due to "creative differences." Meanwhile, Producer Daniel Bekerman claimed that it was extremely difficult for them to get the film screened outside the US.

The Independent also stated that Donald Trump's team had tried to get the movie blocked before its Cannes debut in May and even called the movie a piece of "pure fiction". Steven Cheung, Trump's campaign spokesperson for the 2024 Presidential elections later threatened to sue filmmakers. He said:

"We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers."

To this, Abbasi responded and said:

"Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people, they don’t talk about his success rate."

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Everything to know about the controversial Donald Trump movie The Apprentice

The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Trump's mentor Roy Cohn. As per Independent, the movie has been described as an "origin story" and deals with the years of Donald Trump's career in New York real estate in the 1970s and 80s.

Abbasi spoke about the film, as reported by The Associated Press on September 5, and said:

"This project has been pretty crazy, from beginning to the end It’s still not completely there. It’s going to get more crazy, maybe."

As per Independent, Kinematics owner Dan Snyder reportedly got offended by several scenes of the movie, where Trump was shown consuming drugs and even having affairs. In the movie, Trump had also been seen to be quite influenced by attorney Roy Cohn who was disbarred in 1986 for unethical conduct.

Another very controversial scene of the movie is when Donald Trump is seen r*ping his first wife Ivana in the 1970s. For the unversed, Ivana had accused him of s*xually assaulting her in a divorce deposition in 1989. In 2015, however, she refused to take any accountability for the allegations she made back then.

On August 30, Briarcliff Entertainment announced last week that they'd open the movie on October 11, which is less than a month before the upcoming Presidential elections. The outlet further added that the film is still trying to get more screens so that it could cater to more audiences.