Trump’s Hollywood tariff threat greeted with skepticism

President Trump is threatening to rewrite the script on how Hollywood does business, with his talk of a tariff on foreign films alarming entertainment industry veterans and sending them scrambling to figure out both the impact and likelihood of a blockbuster-sized shake-up. 

The White House said on Monday that while “no decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the administration is exploring all options” on Trump’s directive. 

A day earlier, Trump wrote in a Truth Social post that he was authorizing the Department of Commerce to “immediately begin the process of instituting a 100 percent tariff on any and all movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

“WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!” he said, calling the “concerted effort" by others to attract filmmakers overseas a “national security threat.”

But the plan was met with almost immediate skepticism from both Democrats and Republicans alike. 

“Is this really what we’re focused on?” one Republican strategist who is a staunch Trump supporter said on Monday. “Let’s get serious.” 

Doug Heye, the veteran GOP strategist who does not support Trump, accused the president of “trying to get people to pay attention.”

“That’s it,” Heye said. 

White House officials on Monday pointed to a New York Times report showing that Hollywood production tanked in recent months, decreasing roughly 29 percent from January through March of this year. 

And Trump himself dug in on the issue. 

“Our film industry has been decimated,” Trump said in remarks on Monday when asked about the tariff threat. “It has abandoned the USA.” 

He vowed to meet with film industry leaders and “make sure they’re happy with it because we are all about jobs.” 

Still, Democrats and Republicans threw cold water on such a plan.

“Trump’s whole tariff scheme, and the way he’s explained it, shows what an economic ignoramus he is,” said Garry South, a veteran political strategist based in California. 

“When it comes to slapping tariffs on movies made overseas, it’s evidence he doesn’t understand how movies are made — and viewed — either,” South said. “Having Trump prescribe tariffs is like having your next-door neighbor, who’s not a doctor, prescribe your medications.” 

South posed questions many strategists on both sides of the aisle wondered on Monday: “There’s no way this could even work: How do you slap a tariff on movies watched online? What if a movie has only one or two scenes filmed in a foreign country? 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t respond to a request for comment, and the Motion Picture Association (MPA) declined to weigh in on Trump’s remarks. 

A 2023 report from the MPA found that the film industry “generated a positive balance of trade in every major market in the world.” Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis found that as of 2023, the country was running a large trade surplus in movie and TV programming — reporting $22.6 billion in exports and $7.2 billion in imports. 

Jennifer Porst, an associate professor at Emory University and the co-director of the concentration of film and media management, said the numbers around so-called runaway productions have “absolutely gone down” but added that it’s been happening in Hollywood “since its beginning really.” 

Still, Porst added that the movie tariff push is “an incredibly complicated topic.” 

“At the moment a lot of things related to what [Trump] has suggested are unclear and it’s hard to tell what the intention is,” Porst said. 

She said Trump’s concerns about the physical production outside the U.S. and the concern about soft power propaganda are both at play, and “unpacking both of those things is very complicated.”  

“There are a lot of questions to be answered,” she said. 

At the same time, Critics were quick to pounce on Trump’s foreign film tariff push. 

Longtime movie critic Richard Roeper cracked on the social platform X that the productions set abroad would suddenly be completely reworked with American backdrops to accommodate the mandate from the president. 

“Looking forward to ‘Emily in Paris, TX,' ‘Harry Potter and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,’ 'The Pirates of Lake Michigan,’ 'The Merchant of Venice, CA,'” Roeper said in a post on Monday. 

Heye suggested that rather than a new economic policy that could hit Hollywood hard, Trump’s tariff threat could be a diversion tactic.

“If we’re talking about Pope memes, Alcatraz and made-up tariffs, we’re not talking about why his economic numbers are underwater,” Heye said.

Alex Gangitano contributed.