Liberation Day has come for Hollywood. If you thought the movie industry had dodged a bullet after President Trump reversed course the last time, think again.
That’s the feeling around town after Trump’s Sunday surprise announcement that he would be instituting a “100 percent tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” (emphasis and Trumpian capitalization all his).
He also said the movie industry is “DYING a very fast death,” and that the incentives other countries are offering amounts to a “National Security threat.”
We’ve noted before that Trump, is in some ways, right about at least one part of this. FilmLA just released numbers saying on-location shoot days in Los Angeles were down 22.4 percent the first quarter of this year compared to 2024, and the impact to the local job market has been devastating ever since COVID and through the strikes of 2023. Trump, while shouting in front of his helicopter, said he’s “done some very strong research over the past week,” so we presume he’s been reading IndieWire.
“Hollywood is being destroyed. Now, you have a grossly incompetent governor [Gavin Newsom] that allowed that to happen, so I’m not just blaming other nations, but other nations have stolen our movie industry,” he told C-SPAN. “If they’re not willing to make a movie inside the United States, then we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They’re supporting them financially. That’s sort of a threat to our country in a sense.”
In the mere hours since this was all announced, the White House has already started walking the tough talk back, saying via a spokesperson that “no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made,” but that it was “exploring all options.” And when asked Monday about the movie tariffs while standing next to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell for some reason, he royally dodged the question about how any of this would work.
The first thing to do is to not freak out just yet. It’s not just that Trump’s announcement carries no specifics, but he may not even legally be able to do it.
“The Black Phone” screenwriter C. Robert Cargill shared some language on Bluesky noting that the law Trump is using to enact these tariffs excludes films, as was the case the first time around when the tariffs only applied to goods, not services. “He can’t do shit here,” Cargill wrote. “It’s 100 percent unenforceable even before the ‘how’ of it all.”
Let’s get into that “how” a little bit, even though such an exercise may be futile. We asked one indie producer what questions he has, and he replied, “I mean, all of them? Starting with: please don’t do this?”
Or, more broadly, the following:
- Would it apply to just films or also TV shows produced internationally?
- What about streaming?
- At what point are tariffs applied: when the films go into production, or when they’re being released?
- Would it apply only if a film is physically shot on location outside of America or even if there’s foreign financing involved?
- What about films that shoot only partially across borders?
- Are movies that are already in production or about to begin production going to be retroactively impacted and taxed?
- Who pays these tariffs, the country, the studio, the producers, the distributor, or all of the above?
- Will the costs be felt on ticket prices or on rental fees for studios?
- How do you tax something that is essentially just a digital file uploaded to a server and not a physical product?
- Who enforces any of this?
One of the most immediate concerns is what these proposed tariffs could do to the international sales market, and it’s a brutal coincidence that Trump made this announcement a week before the industry heads off to the Cannes film market.
International sales buyers that participate in pre-sales for many package titles might be scared off, and that would drastically impact the ability for any small or mid-budget movies to get funding. The major studios that have massive production facilities in England, Vancouver, or elsewhere would feel a pinch no doubt but may find that a 100 percent tariff still doesn’t offset the higher cost of doing business in the U.S. as a result of fewer tax incentives, union regulations, and an overall higher cost of doing business.
Trump made his announcement shortly after reports surfaced that Jon Voight, one of three “special ambassadors” Trump appointed to be his eyes and ears in Hollywood, has been taking meetings around town about how to address issues within the industry (one of the others, Sylvester Stallone, hasn’t seemed to be involved, while the third, Mel Gibson, is planning to shoot his “Passion of the Christ” sequel in Rome). But Deadline shared that Voight was eyeing a tax incentive being offered on the federal level, something that could help the U.S. combat foreign influence while adding on top of incentives coming from the state level.
That’s something producer Jason Michael Berman, the producer of the Spike Lee film “Highest 2 Lowest” (shot all in New York, for what it’s worth) would be all for ahead of him heading out to the Cannes market.
“Hopefully, the positive that can come out of this is that we can actually help get more support behind a national tax incentive program for the creation of content. We always want to look at the glass half full,” he told IndieWire. “There’s going to be a spotlight put on this now, which a lot of us have been ringing the bell about, especially producers like myself. So hopefully there’s not an overreaction to this, because there’s a lot of things that have to be figured out.”
That’s putting it mildly.
