Trump orders ‘100% tariff’ on all movies produced abroad
The trend of American filmmakers and companies working overseas has left Hollywood "devastated," according to US President Donald Trump, who said on Sunday that he was imposing new taxes on all films produced outside the US.
The move coincides with growing criticism of the White House's tough trade policies, which have seen Trump impose broad penalties on nations worldwide.
He posted on his Truth Social platform, "I am giving the Department of Commerce and the US Trade Representative permission to start the process of imposing a 100% tariff on any and all movies that are coming into our country that are created in foreign lands right now."
“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!”
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reposted Trump’s missive, saying “We’re on it.”
No details were provided on how the tariff would be implemented.
Trump’s post comes after China, which has taken the brunt of the US president’s combative trade policies with 145 percent tariffs on many goods, said last month it would reduce the number of US films it imported.
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death. Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States,” Trump wrote Sunday.
“Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated,” he added, claiming that production being drawn to other countries was a “National Security threat.”
The implications for the movie industry — or how exactly the tariffs would be enacted — were not immediately clear.
Additionally, Trump's post made no mention of the potential impact on television programs, a growingly popular and lucrative industry of film creation.
Not in the top five is the US.
According to the most recent figures from the Motion Picture Association, Hollywood is a significant industry in the US economy, creating over 2.3 million employment and bringing in $279 billion in 2022.
However, industry insiders claim that the industry is still having difficulty regaining its momentum in the wake of the Hollywood strikes and the effects of the COVID pandemic, which altered how Americans watched movies, choosing to watch at home rather than in theaters.
The United States is a major location for filming, with $14.5 billion in production expenditures, according to a January study by production tracking service ProdPro. However, that number represents a 26% decrease from two years prior.
Toronto came first, then Britain, Vancouver, Central Europe, and finally Australia. California was ranked sixth.
Trump named longtime allies Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone as special envoys to Hollywood before to his January inauguration.
In a post on Truth Social, he claimed that they will make the entertainment sector "STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE."
In the past, the entertainment sector has not been very supportive of Trump and the Republicans. In the 2024 presidential election, a number of celebrities, including Taylor Swift and George Clooney, supported Democrat Kamala Harris.
