Contents
Hollywood went into a collective panic Sunday evening when President Donald Trump posted on social media his plans to authorize the U.S. Trade Representative and the Commerce Department to begin implementing a 100 percent tariff on imports of movies produced in “Foreign Lands.”
Referring to the mass exodus of productions from the film industry’s spiritual birthplace in California to far-flung locales including the U.K., Australia, Canada, Hungary, and Romania thanks to generous, state-funded tax subsidies in those places, Trump declared a “National Security Threat,” writing, “The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated…Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!”
Later questioned by reporters outside Air Force Two on Sunday, the president pinned partial blame on California governor Gavin Newsom, elaborating, “Hollywood is being destroyed. You have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving them big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense.”
Trump added of the planned tariffs: “It’s been a very popular thing. Moviemakers love it.”
Inside Hollywood’s Thirty-Mile Zone, however, the reaction was more like unvarnished dismay. Studio executives, agents, and producers groused that the tariff plan was ill-conceived, lacking in details, and overall shitty for business. Arriving just days before what can often be a bustling acquisitions marketplace at the Cannes Film Festival, studio chieftains hastily organized war rooms to discuss implications surrounding the tariffs and ponder potential courses of action. Independent producers and sales agents agonized over what many of them see as an existential threat to their business. And Newsom’s administration, which has been maneuvering to double California’s television and movie tax incentives to $750 million per year, cast shade on Trump’s legal standing to pursue such recourse, with a senior adviser telling Deadline, “We believe he has no authority to impose tariffs under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act since tariffs are not listed as a remedy under that law.”
Call it the fix for runaway production — that is, the catchall term for movie and TV projects intended for U.S. release that are filmed outside the country — that nobody in Hollywood wants. The knee-jerk, industry-wide hand-wringing underscored that Trump’s tariff authorization begs many more questions than it provides concrete solutions for. Among them:
How would this even work?
Not everything shooting outside the U.S. can be classified as a runaway production. And any C-suite studio exec will tell you: Import taxes are a kind of theoretical impossibility given the highly interconnected, international nature of modern moviemaking. Take this summer’s Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning. While nominally a Hollywood production — made by an American studio (Paramount) using American crews and showcasing the poster boy for American movie stardom, Tom Cruise — the movie is specifically plotted around international intrigue and was shot around the world, including in the U.K., Norway, South Africa, and Malta. Does a production like that get penalized for not confining filming to American locations? In the absence of clear standards regarding what gets tariffed and how, the knock-on effect for globetrotting franchises such as James Bond and The Fast and the Furious would be devastating.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
Moreover, when a studio like Universal films a movie like, say, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey in overseas locales including Morocco, Greece, and Sicily, it does not “import” the film per se given the project’s genesis and financial backing were arranged in the U.S. Things get even more abstract when you factor in how much VFX and post-production on Hollywood megabudget projects takes place in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and the U.K. Figuring out what and how much was produced in “Foreign Lands” would hardly be an absolute science.
Who would be impacted most?
Shooting Stateside minus the kind of tax incentives typically supplied across Europe and Australia can tack on as much as an additional 40 percent to a typical production. And that’s not including the cost of American below-the-line crews, which are more expensive than their international counterparts due to heavy unionization under the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (which, despite its name, is an American concern).
Even with advances in A.I. and photo-real green-screen shooting to offset those domestic costs, a tariff could dictate that many low-budget movies (think last year’s Oscar winners such as The Brutalist, filmed largely in Hungary, and A Real Pain, filmed in Poland) simply don’t come into existence at all. “The tariffs basically destroy indie film,” an executive at an independent studio told me Monday morning. “This is going to depress buying at Cannes. Anytime there’s an international co-production, forget American distribution because of this crazy tax. It’s a shitshow.”
Is Trump really doing this?
Key to any discussion of the president’s imposition of tariffs is that he has so far only authorized them. He hasn’t pulled the trigger on anything. While media stocks have plummeted since Trump’s Truth Social announcement, the U.S. Trade Representative and Commerce Department have so far announced no specific steps to penalize movies filmed with component parts from abroad. And in a clarifying statement Monday, White House spokesman Kush Desai pointed out “no final decisions on foreign-film tariffs have been made.”
In recent months, the president imposed a 25 percent tariff on all goods from Colombia only to quickly reverse course when the country “agreed to all of President Trump’s terms”; he also announced a plan to impose unspecified tariffs on foreign cars — originally planning to impose them April 1 but pushing to the second of April because he was “a little superstitious” about the April Fool’s holiday. His frequent imposition and suspension of tariffs has roiled markets and befuddled trading partners ostensibly in the service of scoring political points and economic leverage but more generally contributing to an era of financial turbulence. U.S. secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick retweeted the president’s tariff announcement on X, attaching the message “we’re on it,” but whether Trump ultimately follows through with foreign-movie tariffs is anyone’s guess.
Is he going to impose tariffs on television too?
Throughout the Peak TV era, series production has fled the U.S. at a similarly alarming rate. The Rob Lowe–hosted trivia-game show The Floor, for instance, films in Ireland, which provides a tax credit of up to 32 percent. A report by the research firm ProdPro indicates that film and television production in the U.S. (with budgets of more than $40 million) plummeted by 26 percent from two years earlier. But Trump has as yet made no mention of tariff imposition on runaway TV production.
In January, Trump appointed MAGA loyalists Sylvester Stallone, Jon Voight, and Mel Gibson as “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, asserting the actors would help claw back the entertainment industry’s production exodus. In recent days, Voight has reportedly been taking meetings with studio executives and labor-union representatives including the Directors Guild of America, IATSE, and the Teamsters ahead of presenting a plan to revive showbiz. “These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest,” Trump said.
