Donald Trump wants to make Hollywood great again. But left to his own devices he might just make it worse. The US president directed his team last weekend to begin exploring a 100 per cent tariff on all films produced abroad, claiming that the American movie industry is “dying”. That is a showman’s take. But the sector is indeed under pressure. Between 2021 and 2024, film and TV production spending in the US fell 28 per cent. A host of recent major Hollywood films — from Avatar in 2009 to Wicked in 2024 — have been at least partially filmed outside of America. How import duties are supposed to help is, however, a conundrum.
For starters, filmmaking is a highly globalised industry. Funding often comes from a consortium of international investors. Scripts are brought to life through a combination of global talent, real-world settings, and high-end computer-generated imagery. It is difficult to find all that in America. Sure, Las Vegas has its own Eiffel Tower, but Netflix’s recent hit show Emily in Paris would have felt a lot less Parisian filmed in Nevada. Training all-American actors to do foreign dialects also has its limits.
Determining how any such tariff might be applied would be an unenviable task for a White House adviser. What is the appropriate local content requirement? Will any duty apply to movies streamed on platforms such as Netflix, Apple and Amazon? If so, how can it be enforced? Will it also apply to films currently in production, such as Marvel’s latest Avengers instalment which began filming in England’s Pinewood Studios last month? There’s a risk that answers to these complex questions may just be whittled down to a crudely simplistic formula, à la Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs.