Two recent movies about former U.S. presidents have had significantly different starts at the box office.
The Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice opened in theaters over the weekend and has fared significantly worse than the Ronald Reagan biopic, Reagan, starring Dennis Quaid.
Reagan premiered in cinemas August 30 and made $7.65 million at the national box office on its opening weekend, while the The Apprentice, which opened on October 11, made $1.61 million, according to tracking website Box Office Mojo.
Reagan also outperformed The Apprentice on daily earnings.
Dennis Quaid (L) arrives at the Reagan premiere in Hollywood, California, on August 20, 2024, and a still showing Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in ‘The Apprentice’ movie. ‘Reagan’ outperformed ‘The Apprentice’ in its opening four days in theaters.
Sthanlee B. Mirador/ Rawhide Press, APPRENTICE PRODUCTIONS ONTARIO INC/ PROFILE PRODUCTIONS 2 APS/ TAILORED FILMS LTD. 2023/Sipa via AP/Rawhide Press
The Apprentice took $482,803 per day on average during its first four days, earning a high of $590,628 on its opening day and $317,980 on its fourth—the latest daily figure available—on October 14.
Reagan took $2.58 million per day on average during its first four days, raking in $2.7 million on its opening day and $2.65 million three days later on Labor Day.
Reagan has appeared in more theaters. At its peak it was screened at 2,770 venues compared to 1,740 cinemas so far showing The Apprentice.
The Reagan biopic was universally panned by critics, being dubbed “the worst kind of hagiography” in The Boston Globe and “the worst movie of the year” on The Daily Beast website.
Yet the movie appeared to go down well with audiences, defying box office expectations and earning a 98 percent score among verified audience reviewers on movie-rating site Rotten Tomatoes at time of publication.
Reagan was independently financed, with a grassroots marketing campaign which paled in comparison to some advertising budgets for Hollywood movies. Directed by Sean McNamara, it was loosely based on The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, a 2006 book written by Paul Kengor.
The Apprentice was made with a $16 million budget and 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 movie stars Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump.
The Trump biopic also faced a huge challenge to be released in theaters, after struggling to find a distributor after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May. Director Ali Abbasi described making the movie and then getting it released as the “most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
“When we were at [film festival] Cannes and we got a standing ovation and everyone was so happy and flattering, I was thinking there was going to be a bidding war, do I want to go with Warner or Netflix, who do I want to pick?” he told the BBC, adding that “it was extremely difficult for us to get a distributor,” which he believed was because Trump threatened legal action.
Trump criticized the movie on his social media platform Truth Social before it premiered.
“A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, The Apprentice (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully ‘bomb,” the Republican presidential candidate in November’s election wrote.
“It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, ‘MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!'”
