Trump’s “The Apprentice” film lags behind “Reagan” at the box office

Two recent films about former US presidents had significantly different starts at the box office.

The Donald Trump biopic The apprentice came into theaters at the weekend and performed significantly worse than the Ronald Reagan biopicReagan, with Dennis Quaid.

Reagan premiered in theaters on August 30 and grossed $7.65 million at the national box office in its opening weekend The Apprentice, which opened on October 11, made According to the tracking website, $1.61 million Box office mojo.

Reagan too exceeded The apprentice on daily earnings.

The apprentice Sales averaged $482,803 per day over the first four days, peaking at $590,628 on the opening day and $317,980 on the fourth day – the most recent daily value available – on October 14.

Reagan It averaged $2.58 million per day in its first four days, $2.7 million on opening day, and $2.65 million three days later on Labor Day.

Reagan has appeared in other cinemas. At its peak, the film was shown in 2,770 cinemas; so far it has been shown in 1,740 cinemas The apprentice.

The Reagan The biopic was widely panned by critics, calling it “the worst kind of hagiography.” The Boston Globe and “the worst movie of the year” on The Daily Beast’s website.

Still, the film appeared to be well-received by audiences, exceeding box office expectations and earning a score of 98 percent from verified reviewers on film review site Rotten Tomatoes at the time of release.

Reagan was independently financed, with a grassroots marketing campaign that paled in comparison to some Hollywood film advertising budgets. The film was directed by Sean McNamara and is loosely based on The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communisma book by Paul Kengor from 2006.

The apprentice Produced on a budget of $16 million, it tells a version of Trump’s life in New York in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on his relationships with his lawyer Roy Cohn and his first wife, Ivana Trump.

The film stars Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump.

The Trump biopic also faced a major challenge getting into theaters after struggling to find a distributor following its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May. Director Ali Abbasi described the film’s production and its subsequent release as “the most challenging thing I have ever done”.

“When we were there [film festival] Cannes and we got a standing ovation and everyone was so happy and complimentary that I thought there was a bidding war. “Do I want to choose Warner or Netflix, who should I choose?” he told the BBC. He added that “it was extremely difficult for us to find a distributor,” which he said was because Trump threatened legal action.

Trump criticized the film before its premiere on his social media platform Truth Social.

“A fake and classless film called The Apprentice (do they even have the right to use that name without permission?) written about me will hopefully be a bomb,” the Republican presidential candidate wrote in the election November.

“It is a cheap, defamatory and politically repugnant hatchet job carried out just before the 2024 presidential election to damage the greatest political movement in our country’s history: ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!'”