Lights, Camera, Confusion

Trump has now taken his trade war to the movies. He has initiated a 100% tariff “on any and all movies…produced in foreign lands”. The US film industry, which the president wants to make “bigger, better and stronger than ever before”, just hasn’t seen this coming. Nor does it understand what this means.He made the announcement on Truth Social over the weekend. Despite all the industrywallahs knocking their heads against this since, it’s still not clear exactly how the new Trump tariff shall be enforced and which type of film productions shall bear its brunt. Actually, it’s also not clear if Trump will walk back from this. But as Variety has reported, what is clear is the disquiet the announcement has spread across the industry. The worry is that if the 100% tariff is enacted, it could upend and even decimate a film business that is emphatically global, relying as it does on a network of international incentives and foreign locations to make movies.Another thing that is clear is that if cinema and audiovisual media take a hit from the Trump administration, it will not be in US alone. Gaetan Bruel, president of France’s national film board, for example points out that Europe, and France in particular, are major markets for American works, which represent roughly 60% of the content that people consume in Europe.And the strange thing is that nobody was out on streets protesting how Hollywood was down for the count and needed rescuing. Indeed, the reports say that 2025 has seen a rebound in box office numbers, with overall domestic revenues 15.8% ahead of 2024. According to IMDb data, the global box office of US film productions runs over $30bn annually. This is one of our largest industries and certainly one of the greatest exporters of US goods. Yes, the industry was wounded both by Covid and by labour strikes, which executives allowed to linger for months. This motivated moving more production overseas. Still, production in Hollywood and in Atlanta, which has become a major player due to incentives offered by Georgia in particular, is flourishing. Current box office for Ryan Coogler’s vampiric Sinners promises that the film will be one of the year’s highest revenue earners. It was shot in Louisiana while the story is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930s, and is allegorically critical of Trumpist ideology.* So, again, is the Trump tariff aimed at ‘runaway’ productions? These are Hollywood films shot in other countries such as Canada, Australia or Hungary, which offer various attractive incentives for their locations standing in for US venues. * Or, would the tariff outlaw location shooting per se? When a US story is set in India for example. * Does it include television production? One of the most lucrative TV productions of recent times has been The White Lotus, created by Mike White for HBO. It premiered in 2021 and features a different location every season. While its first season was set in Hawaii, the second was shot in Sicily and the most recent one in Thailand. The whole show premise is built upon specific touristic aspects. In the classical age of Hollywood productions, such a show would have shot the interiors in Hollywood while the exterior backgrounds or scenic establishing shots were filmed elsewhere, by a skeletal crew, without the actors present, and then cut into the film for atmosphere. The 1953 Howard Hawks film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has its Paris scenes, with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell performing as showgirls, done in this way. But my own theory is that it was Pedro Almodovar’s censure of the US president in his own backyard that angered him and put a target on foreign films. The Spanish director lit into “Trump and his friends, millionaires, and oligarchs” at the Lincoln Centre in New York last week: “You will go down in history as one of the greatest damages to humanity…as a catastrophe.” In his Truth Social post, Trump referred to the “national security threat” from the “messaging and propaganda” of other nations luring American filmmakers. In referring to the dangerous ideology of foreign films, his entourage may well have in mind the gender fluidity in Almodovar films. Ironically, Almodovar’s most recent film The Room Next Door shot its upstate NYC scenes in Spain, along with most of the US interiors, except for a scene at Lincoln Centre. This is indeed a reverse of the US process from the fifties. The European electric plugs are easily spotted in the rented mountain retreat, in which its two leading women spend most of the film.Of course a 100% tariff on ‘runaway’ US productions would be disastrous for the very lucrative US industry itself. As for foreign film distribution in US, it’s already greatly reduced. There are theatres in NYC and a few other places specialising in Indian films for immigrant audiences and there is a cult following for these films. But the major distributors of foreign films these days are streaming services. Only a few films get breakthrough mainstream distribution. Slumdog Millionaire, the 2008 British film directed by Danny Boyle, is one example of an exception.The entire tariff situation is subject to court challenges. I think the film tariff will definitely lose in the courts. As University of Virginia professor Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, the law on emergency wartime tariffs that Trump has been using to justify making tariff policy that otherwise is Congress’s purview, exempts film and entertainment from tariffs.The writer is Professor of Film Studies at University of Florida