In the streaming business, no franchise is ever really dead if it still has name recognition and the potential to stir up a fight. And few old reality-TV properties come with more baggage, more built-in curiosity, or more cultural residue than The Apprentice (2004 – 2017).
Now, Amazon is in early talks of reviving it, with Donald Trump Jr. potentially stepping into the host role. So far, the discussions have reportedly stayed inside Amazon with no outreach yet to the Trump family.
Interestingly, a source close to Donald Trump Jr. told The New York Post that he first learned of the idea from the Wall Street Journal report itself.
Amazon offered a similar note of caution. A spokesperson told The Post that some preliminary internal conversations have taken place since the company acquired MGM in 2022. He noted that the show is not in active development and that any reporting on potential hosts would be speculative.
For anyone who watched the original reality show, Don Jr. and Ivanka Trump are familiar faces. Both frequently appeared in the boardroom scenes alongside their father, serving as advisors across dozens of episodes.
If the project does go ahead, it would air on Prime Video since the streamer holds the rights through the MGM deal.
The $75 million bet
The Apprentice was an enormous hit when NBC put it on the air in 2004. Audiences peaked at around 20 million viewers. Jeff Zucker, then head of entertainment at NBC, was the executive who greenlit the show and placed Trump at its center. Zucker would later run CNN, the network Trump feuded with for years.
Talk of an Apprentice reboot follows a separate, expensive bet Amazon made on the Trump family. The company recently bought the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump for somewhere in the neighborhood of $40 million. Reporting at the time pegged the figure at roughly triple the next-highest offer. Amazon then put another $35 million or so behind a marketing push for the film.
The Melania documentary deal drew internal pushback at Amazon. Some employees raised concerns about both the size of the check and the optics of cutting it. Externally, the criticism was mostly about creative control, with reporting indicating that the first lady had the final say on the cut.
Amazon, however, has defended the decision, saying the only reason it picked up the project was that it expected its customers to enjoy watching it.
The new Apprentice talk also lands in the middle of a noticeable thaw between Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump. The two had been at war during the first Trump term. After the 2024 election, Bezos publicly described the win as one of the great political comebacks. Federal money has flowed Amazon’s way since then. The company has booked tens of billions of dollars in AI and cloud contracts with the government, even as regulators continue to look at it sideways.
Bezos’s other major holding has been a separate kind of headache. The Washington Post, which he owns, has shed senior editors, lost an estimated 250,000 subscribers, and is now bleeding more than $100 million a year.
In such a context, any movement around an Apprentice reboot is unlikely to be viewed as just another programming decision.