Trump's Foreign Film Tariffs Could Stick Us With Nothing but Disney Movies
Tariffs on creative media are barriers not just to goods, but also to ideas.
The destructive economic impact of tariffs is plain enough. At last count, over 1,800 economists have signed a letter denouncing the Trump administration's protectionism for imposing "the largest tax increase on trade in almost a century." But when trade barriers are imposed on media, they don't block just the flow of goods and money, but also of ideas. Unfortunately, that's exactly what one of President Donald Trump's latest brainstorms threatens to do.
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Is Foreign Film Production a National Security Threat?
"The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death," Trump posted on Truth Social. "Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!"
To remedy that "national security threat," he announced "a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands."
First, let's take a moment to be surprised that Donald Trump would want to extend any sort of support to Hollywood. The movie industry is famously nearly monolithic in its leftward politics and its hatred of Donald Trump. In shielding the industry from competition, he's helping his enemies.
"Donald Trump's decisive presidential victory shocked Hollywood as actors, celebrities and media personalities took to social media late Tuesday and early Wednesday to share their feelings of hurt and dismay," Variety's Brent Lang wrote after the November election.
Tariffs on movies produced overseas might drive Hollywood to film more intensively in the United States, but it also makes it more difficult and expensive for American audiences to see movies made by foreign companies. Films from South Korea, India, Europe, and elsewhere compete with the U.S. film industry in terms of culture, ideas, and sometimes politics. Tariffs on overseas productions could effectively trap us with the products of Hollywood and reduce its need to adjust to the tastes of the viewing public.
The monolithic nature of the film industry's dominant ideology (isn't that the sort of "messaging and propaganda" that concerns Trump?) isn't the only whiff of staleness coming from Hollywood. The major companies are risk-averse when it comes to creativity. Instead of innovating, they sink hundreds of millions of dollars into cinematically photocopying the same half-dozen ideas over and over until what hits the screen are expensive and faded reproductions of something that was interesting decades ago.
Hollywood Needs Competition So Very Much
That's why competition is welcome, whether it's independent mumblecore films, A24 productions, Angel Studios, or something else. Sometimes clunky, weird, or just bad, at least they're different and frequently interesting. The same can be said of foreign films.
Parasite and its South Korean director Bong Joon Ho get a lot of love from film geeks, and good for them for finding something they like. (Trump, notably, didn't care for it.) I prefer my films a little more shooty, so I'm partial to Kesari, a 2019 Indian film about a real-life last stand battle in 1897 between 21 Sikh soldiers of the British Indian Army and thousands of Pashtuns. It wonderfully combines explosive combat scenes with Bollywood's signature song-and-dance numbers. Describing it as a cross between Zulu and Singin' in the Rain doesn't do it justice, so just see it for yourself. Or don't. The world should have room for all tastes.
But there's less ability to satisfy a range of tastes when governments raise trade barriers to the import of movies produced in other countries. Will tariffs drive American production companies to film fewer movies in Toronto or Tunisia and instead film those scripts with their Hollywood-acceptable ideas and mostly rewarmed scripts in the United States? Quite possibly. But those tariffs will raise even higher hurdles to movies that originate overseas, are financed with lower budgets, and must necessarily for budgetary, cultural, and language reasons be produced in their home countries. Americans may never get to see them; they may not even be created if access to U.S. audiences becomes economically prohibitive. That could be an especially big deal for the overseas productions that have found new life through streaming services.
In Business Insider, James Faris and Lucia Moses write of the tariffs that "Netflix could limit the impact by shifting production to the US, cutting down US access to foreign-made content on the service, and raising prices to cover higher production costs."
They add that the tariffs could also hurt domestic independent producers because "global outsourcing helped indie production companies that have less access to financing. Film financing is tenuous, so higher costs could mean fewer films getting made."
To the extent that anybody benefits, it's likely to be the established mainstream domestic film industry. But production costs will go up for them, too, if they have to pay American prices for everything—including simulating settings in other countries. So, they'll probably play it safe, taking even fewer risks and creating even more of the tried-and-true products they've been knocking out in recent years. That means less pressure to experiment with new plots or to make any attempt to satisfy the audience's appetite for ideas that interest the diverse members of the public rather than just the accepted wisdom of name-brand actors and directors.
Locked in a Room With Disney
In some ways, Trump's tariff scheme for movies perfectly encapsulates what's so bad about protectionism. In "protecting" a domestic industry, it softens incentives for homegrown producers to innovate, to be efficient, and to satisfy their customers. That's bad enough with cars and toys. With barriers against creative media like movies, we also get restrictions on competing ideas.
Trump's vision of the movie industry he'll craft with 100-percent tariffs that constitute a barricade against the creative visions of filmmakers from outside Hollywood looks an awful lot like locking American viewers in a room with the Walt Disney Company. Forever.
In fact, tariffs on movies emulate the worst practices of authoritarian countries like China, which augment overt censorship with, as Variety's Rebecca Davis noted in 2022, "protectionist policies limiting the import of foreign content."
Trump talks of sheltering the American film industry, but his protectionism is un-American.
