President Donald Trump speaks to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House after arriving in Washington on May 4.TIERNEY L. CROSS/The New York Times News Service
For the past few months, Jon Voight has been quietly taking meetings with U.S. studio executives and entertainment-industry unions as the actor – perhaps best known today for biting the arm of Cosmo Kramer – tries to fulfill his mandate as one of U.S. President Donald Trump’s “special ambassadors” to the film industry. (The other two unofficial envoys, announced by Trump in January, are Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson, right-leaning Hollywood fixtures who, unlike Voight, are presumably too busy making movies to take the White House’s instructions seriously).
One of the problems that Voight has been asked to solve by Trump is a legitimate one: production of movies inside the United States, specifically California, has cratered over the past few years. While the pandemic and the duelling Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 didn’t help the situation, the exodus of Hollywood from its own home base is largely due to one thing: money.
Over the past decade, countless international territories have seriously beefed up their financial incentives and infrastructures while the more familiar U.S. production hotbeds of L.A., New York, and Atlanta struggled to respond. Today, most Marvel movies are filmed in London. The same goes for the DC, Star Wars, and Fast & Furious franchises. Many mid-budget action flicks (including this summer’s forthcoming John Wick spinoff, Ballerina) have decamped to Eastern Europe. And Canada has practically invented the Hallmark Movie industrial complex, providing not only the generous tax incentives but the well-developed local talent. It’s not personal, it’s just business.
Last week, word around Hollywood was that Voight was set to finally unveil his grand Make American Movies Great Again plan to Trump. But if Voight’s idea is indeed the same one that Trump unveiled on the Truth Social platform Sunday night, then the White House got what it deserved when it enlisted the erstwhile star of Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2 to be the brain behind its initiative.
The President announced that instead of, say, reasonably coaxing U.S. states into revamping their tax-break programs for film productions or adding a federal layer of financial incentives for shooting domestically, he will slap a 100-per-cent tariff on “any and all movies coming into our country that are produced by foreign lands.” Like so many of Trump’s pronouncements, there were no details or timelines offered – only the thoroughly ridiculous notion that the situation represented a “National Security threat.”
There are approximately 10,000 reasons why such a plan would not and should not work.
For starters, films and any other “informational sources” produced abroad are constitutionally protected from any sanctions thanks to the Berman Amendment, which was passed in 1988 to protect the free flow of culture internationally, even from “adversarial” states. (The obscure measure was rescued from the margins of Cold War history in 2023 after D.C. tried to ban TikTok.)
Second, Hollywood’s major studios – which are controlled by some of the largest corporations in the United States – would simply implode were they forced to add tariffs to, say, this summer’s new Fantastic Four movie (filmed in London) or James Cameron’s upcoming Avatar sequel (New Zealand) or the latest Mission: Impossible instalment (filmed absolutely everywhere).
While Hollywood CEOs have so far shown a craven attitude toward Trump in his second term – squashing diversity initiatives, erasing trans characters from productions, throwing millions to the First Family – any so-called tariff would kill their businesses overnight, and result in a never-ending stream of apoplectic phone calls to the Oval Office from the heads of such American behemoths as Amazon, Comcast, Apple, Disney, and Netflix. Who would then have exceedingly plausible cause to sue. (The 2025 U.S. box office is actually up compared with 2024, refuting any Trump claims about economic emergency, while the national-security threat is equally implausible.)
Meanwhile, if the move is simply a sneering response to Beijing – which recently restricted the number of U.S. films it lets into China over Trump’s other tariffs – then it is far too little, too late, given that Hollywood largely abandoned the complex and fickle Chinese marketplace years ago.
But – and because Trump’s 2025 tenure has so far demanded countless “buts” – if some iteration of a foreign-film tariff were to become reality, it would swiftly and single-handedly destroy Canadian culture. Between April 2023 and April 2024, foreign location and service (FLS) production – essentially, films and television series shot in Canada that were financed by foreign (often Hollywood) producers – came in at $4.73-billion, or almost half of the total volume of film and TV production inside this country.
And that was during a particularly off year, owing to the impact of the strikes. Typically, Hollywood productions coming here to shoot pump even more money into the domestic screen sector – we are talking about billions and billions of dollars that keep our sound stages humming, our craftspeople employed (more than 26,000 in B.C. alone), and our own producers flush enough to bring genuinely Canadian-made stories to the screen.
So much of Canadian culture – films and series that are shot here, written and directed by Canadian creatives, and starring Canadian performers – are largely made possible thanks to the FLS side of the screen-sector equation. And while television was not mentioned in Trump’s post, so much of our homegrown TV is financed with the assumption that it can be sold to global markets, including American broadcasters. Any tariff would kill our big- and small-screen industry cold.
As is almost always the case, the mood inside the Canadian film community is currently oscillating between eye-popping panic, despair, and incredulity. Filmmakers, producers, and distributors have already spent the past half-decade waging the Online Streaming Act (Bill C-11) fight, which even in the current “elbows up” era seems to be going nowhere very slowly. Could Ottawa respond to any possible Trump tariff by placing a counter-tax on Hollywood movies coming into Canada? Movie theatre owners, already tackling a generational audience crisis, would lose whatever precious little cool they had left. And consumers would riot over any extra ticket or streaming subscription cost passed onto them. We’re stuck.
But, before Mark Carney threatens to forcibly repatriate Seth Rogen and Ryan Gosling under the cover of darkness, everyone in the film industry – both in Canada and in any other “foreign land” that is apparently pumping “propaganda” into the hearts and minds of Americans – should take a breather.
Trump’s movie-tariff idea arrived at the tail end of a 48-hour period in which the President also, in no particular order, said he “doesn’t know” if he has to abide by the U.S. Constitution, announced that he wanted to reopen Alcatraz prison even though it’s been a museum for more than half a century, and revealed that he thinks himself as a Jedi warrior fighting the Empire of woke-ism (albeit brandishing the red lightsaber favoured by the evil Sith).
Perhaps Trump should stop taking calls from Jon Voight, step away from social media, and watch a made-in-America classic about solving one’s financial worries that he would more easily identify with: It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.
