President Donald Trump says his administration will institute high tariffs on movies that fit the nebulous category of “produced in foreign lands,” a definition that could include anything from anime to the latest Marvel films.
In a Sunday evening Truth Social post, Trump claimed that “Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States,” something that constituted “a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat.” (Capitalization in original.) To change this, Trump declared that he was authorizing the Department of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative to begin adding a 100 percent tariff to “any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
Like many of Trump’s tariff proposals, the post creates a cloud of uncertainty over a huge swathe of American consumer goods. If the plan is carried out, the US could theoretically attempt to tax anyone who imports a foreign film into the US. It could similarly try to tax American films that are shot fully or partially in foreign locations, which would include countless Hollywood blockbusters; Marvel’s new Thunderbolts, for instance, was shot largely in the US but partly in Malaysia.
But while Trump has implemented tariffs on a huge range of imported goods, they’re physical goods that can be inspected at a port of entry. Some films are still distributed as physical media, but it is unclear how an equivalent tax would work on something like a digital Netflix stream of a foreign-made film.
As The New York Times notes, overseas filming of US-produced movies does reduce demand for American film crews, and California Governor Gavin Newsom is attempting to increase the state’s own tax incentives for shooting in the country. Trump, however, has previously derided the idea of offering businesses money to work in the US, dubbing a Biden-era subsidy for chip-makers “ridiculous.”
This film tariff announcement follows a push to make Hollywood more Trump-friendly. After taking office, the president appointed a trio of supportive “ambassadors” (including Mel Gibson, Jon Voight, and Sylvester Stallone) to the film industry. His Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, issued an order to investigate Disney over its diversity policies, including a quota for writing and casting film and TV characters from “underrepresented groups.”
Trump has repeatedly backed down on or delayed some tariff plans, but he’s persisted in fighting a high-stakes US-China trade war that’s reducing shipments between the two countries to a trickle, raising the odds of a financial recession. So while there’s a huge amount of confusion over how a proposed film tariff would work, it may not be an idle threat.
