There would be retaliation and Hollywood exports far more than the US imports with entertainment. This would cause much more damage for the US film industry.
How would that even work? At what point do you charge the tariff?
I think this is good. It will help local (outside the US) artistic industries space to flourish without being threatened by Hollywood.
Movies all over the world face inmence pressure form competing from Hollywood, buy without that pressure, they could focus on their local strengths instead.
Yeah USians are probably fucked though, but it’s kinda bad to feel bad for the facists and their enablers.
i don’t really see how… it’ll make movies from outside the US more expensive inside the US, but it doesn’t effect the price of US movies elsewhere
… without retaliation from many other countries of course, but idk if that’ll happen really: europe has kinda gone with retaliating in other areas: specific to applying pressure rather than broad
International movie makers will stop trying to appease Hollywood because they know that it’s very unlikely their movies will play in the US. So they will focus on other international markets. It’s the same thing we saw with the other tariffs, right? Buyers and sellers are going to look for new business deals in every other country in the world because it makes more sense than dealing with a lunatic who were randomly impose and erase tariffs.
I was under the impression that they film a great deal of movies in Canada because it costs far less than filming anywhere else. We also have places that look very modern while maintaining very gothic cities and all of the land in between that could be filmed to look like many places abroad. So he’s costing the film industry the savings that they have gotten used to by filming in Canada. Art of the deal.
Apart from the point that this would be illegal (he won’t know or care, but it is), imagine other countries responding in kind? At least our country imports more media from the US than we produce on our own. And the return tarrifs costs and losses caused by that would also hit primarily US companies like Netflix, Disney, Amazon, AplleTV…
Explain to me how the fuck does this fix the economy?…
2+2=5
Making people poorer helps the rich get richer
Not when retaliatory tariffs come up
Ah yes that correct!
I don’t think that’s what he’s trying to do.
Ok? This is current year, I can just use a VPN to stream foreign movies.
I am so tired of all the BS this regime keeps throwing at everything.
I’m getting so sick of this guy.
As a dual US and EU citizen, good!* European movies are better than that Hollywood shit anyway.
*for the record, neither this nor anything else Trump is doing is actually good.
Uh, ok, what?
Are we trying to drown out foreign influence now? Like, idk, China? North Korea?
Media is our biggest GDP dollar. Donnie is playing with fire here. I’d bet my life savings he backs down, like he has on everything else.
Maybe he’s talking about movies shot in Canada? I think a lot (no idea of an actual percentage) of movies are shot in Vancouver.
A lot of TV shows and movies are made in Canada because our dollar is worth less, so American companies get more value for their money.
Québec has done a lot of VFX for movies too. Hallmark movies often film in northern Ontario.
…software is next…
🐧
The US being by far the biggest exporter of movies, the only way this makes sense is that Trump is not seeing enough ass-kissing (and
bribescampaign donations) from the US movie industry, so he’s actively trying to damage them.Claim foreign movies are a threat, wait for other countries to retaliate against US movies, sit back and watch
bribessales of $TRUMP grow as the major studios seek his political favor.I mean at least this is one of the situations where at its base a tariff makes sense in an industry protectionist way. Its not like putting insane tariffs on goods we dont even manufacture here whatsoever, which is just stupid.
That said, a 100% tariff is just mind bogglingly stupid dick-swinging in this already hostile trade environment. It would make more sense if it was like 5%. Not something that will make the world boycott our media
Actually this doesn’t protect the industry in any way. It’s an extreme threat to American movies, music, and tech. So far, other countries have not been taxing the US on those three classes of items and services, but if they do, it will destroy Apple and Google and Microsoft and Hollywood in a matter of months.
The Chinese market has been huge for Hollywood, a reciprocal tariff would really change the budget math.
The Chinese market is huge, yes, but increasingly turning away from Hollywood productions to homegrown ones. In 2025 for example 哪吒2 (Nézhā 2) broke scored over $2 billion at the box office, with a record-smashing $1.96 billion of that coming domestically. By way of comparison Captain America 4 only managed $14.4 million so far, a dramatic drop from 2016’s Captain America 3 returns of $180 million in 2016.
For reference, even CA3’s $180 million is an order of magnitude smaller than Nezha 2. CA4’s is two orders of magnitude smaller.
Now this is still true: China’s theatre-going audience, estimated at over half a billion people, is larger than the entire population of the USA. It’s still a hugely important market. But, for example, in 2024 the Chinese box office was estimated at ~6 billion dollars total: and 80% of that went to domestic films. The best-performing foreign film of 2024 (Dune 2) only made $48 million, ranking it about 8th. 7th was 维和防暴队 (Wéihé Fángbàoduì/Formed Police Unit) and it made over $120 million.
I’m pretty sure that the Chinese market for Hollywood films is vanishing.
I mean at least this is one of the situations where at its base a tariff makes sense in an industry protectionist way
Except for the fact that - under no circumstances - do you need tariffs to protect a wildly successful industry. That makes no sense because there’s nothing to protect against. It can literally only do harm.
It’s probably just racism.
Which will result in retaliation against US movies, thus further undermining the US’s unparalleled soft power.
This man is doing literally everything Putin could ever want.
And probably demanded
Movies and TV shows are the US’s cultural export. It helps keep us front of mind. They are essentially asking for retaliation where the US is erased from all foreign screens.
As a non American, that kind of sounds like a good thing tbh. US cultural exportation is why the MAGA right is popping up all over the west
I mean, I would think it’s the billionaire financiers that are directly funding the right, but the movies probably don’t help.
The movies normalized The American Way™ as the default way of doing things. The billionaires then financed the people pitching The American Way™. Without the first, the second wouldn’t work.
Another “Trump said” that should be ignored.
How would this even work? Tariffs function by holding the physical items in customs, until the tax is paid. But a licensing deal on a digital good, that can be transfered undetected over the internet, is impossible to teriff. You could tax it other ways, but 100% of what. The distribution license? The copyright?
I guarantee he hasn’t thought about any of this, and as such this mindless utterance a can be safely ignored.
I’m not sure what logistical hurdle you think cannot be overcome here. All he needs to do is find some stage in the game where any vendor in the United States is required to disclose and pay a tax on whatever is specifically identified as the targeted item. You don’t need to hold the things in customs to do that. We already have tons of taxes that depend partly on the tax filer being honest. And of course they can always be audited later.
The more logical choice would be to tax the distribution license sold by non American entities.
The thing that makes this unenforceable is that what he means is that he wants to tax movies not filmed fully in the US even if they are American movies.
Sure I’ll accept I got all the details wrong. That doesn’t really matter to my point.
My point is that this is another example of him saying something so stupid, that it shouldn’t get any media coverage.Point taken, but this isn’t just a “covfefe moment” though. This is newsworthy because Trump just obliterated half of all money in Hollywood. Gone, reduced to atoms.
Culture is one of the main things that the US exports across the world, and this puts a big old smoking hole in our feet in that regard. This will have tangible repercussions.
This is newsworthy because Trump just obliterated half of all money in Hollywood.
Did he? I thought this was something he just said. Did he sign an executive order or take any action to make it happen?
He says shit all the time, and actually tries to do less than 5% of it.
Sure I’ll accept I got all the details wrong. That doesn’t really matter to my point.
This made me chuckle.
