Trump proposes a 100% tariff on Hollywood films made abroad
It could drive up the cost of tickets, subscriptions, and rentals, as studios will likely pass on the price of the tariff to moviegoers worldwide.
Imagine paying double to bring your own movie back home. That’s the surreal scenario Hollywood is staring down after Trump floated a 100% tariff on films made outside the U.S. “Our movie-making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other countries, just like stealing candy from a baby,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, recycling a threat he first floated back in May.
The idea sounds simple enough, tax foreign movies, until you realize modern filmmaking is anything but simple. Today’s blockbusters are stitched together across continents: shot in Vancouver or Sydney for tax breaks, VFX rendered in London or Mumbai, financing patched in from Seoul or Paris. So when exactly does a movie become “foreign”? And who decides at what point that a 100% tax would kick in?
Studios don’t have answers, and for now, neither does Washington. As analyst Paolo Pescatore put it to Reuters: “There is too much uncertainty, and this latest move raises more questions than answers.” Translation being that the industry is rattled.
Emmanuel Umahi
And there’s plenty at stake. The U.S. runs a $15.3 billion trade surplus in film, exporting more than $22 billion worth of movies in 2023 alone (via Forbes). A tariff wouldn’t just hit studio profits but would shake the entire ecosystem, from the VFX houses in Montreal and Bangalore that power Marvel’s CGI spectacles, to the American crews who routinely travel abroad for shoots.
Audiences wouldn’t escape either. International markets now deliver more than half of box office revenue for most films. If studios are suddenly paying double to bring those films “home,” guess who covers the tab? You. Tickets, streaming subs, even rentals; they’d all creep higher.
Critics argue this isn’t about saving jobs so much as staging political theater, extending Trump’s protectionist trade-war logic into culture. Hollywood unions, for their part, have been begging for domestic tax incentives instead, the proven way to bring productions back stateside. Tariffs, though? That’s uncharted territory.
And the timing couldn’t be worse. Even before this, Hollywood was fighting through an identity crisis: shrinking theatrical windows, streamers cutting back, and AI threatening creative work. Now add a trade war over what even counts as “Made in America.”
So what happens next? Nobody truly knows. But if the White House really pushes ahead, Hollywood may have to wrestle with a question that feels more philosophical than political: what exactly makes a movie American?
Emmanuel Oyedeji
