President Donald Trump made no secret about “tariff” being “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” but no one ever saw it coming to the film industry.
But that’s what seems to be in the works, according to Trump’s Truth Social post earlier this week, and it could have serious consequences for the film industry in Europe.
The president vowed to impose a 100% tariff, but didn’t share further details on when and how it might be rolled out.
If this were to kick in, it would devastate entire industries in the U.K. and Central Europe, especially as more Hollywood movies and shows, including Wicked and Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, are increasingly being shot or produced abroad.
Trump said Hollywood was being “devastated” by the shift, and pointed out that foreign incentives are “propaganda” which pose a “national security threat” to the U.S.
However, as most major media companies, whether Walt Disney or Universal Pictures, shoot projects abroad, it’s clear that the movie-making process is already entirely globalized—anathema to Trump’s “MAGA” message.
Brian Cox, who famously played the role of Logan Roy in HBO series Succession, told Times Radio that the Trump administration didn’t understand “how films are made, and what films cost, [how] the cost of films [has] gone up and the cost of films in America went up considerably.”
“It’s a kind of nonsense and a divine ignorance on all their parts,” Cox added.
News of movie tariffs follows after years of disruptions faced by the industry, including COVID-19 delays, Hollywood actors’ and writers’ strikes, and Los Angeles wildfires. The ripple effects of these have been felt across the world.
Iris Knobloch, president of the Cannes Film Festival, declared that “Hollywood is back” and said the industry is “reinventing itself”. While it’s still early to assess the impact of what might happen if the tariffs roll out, Knobloch, a former Warner executive, told the Financial Times that “films have always been resistant to any kind of political or other pressures.”
“I hope, however, that the global film industry won’t be paralysed by caution and uncertainty,” she said.
Questions abound on how tariffs might impact movie-making
Nearly half of the spending on movie and TV projects by U.S. producers in 2023 was made outside the U.S. when budgets exceeded $40 million, according to research firm ProdPro.
This is largely because countries like the U.K., Belgium, and Hungary offer significant incentives, ranging between 25% and 45% in rebates, if films and shows are made or produced there. In contrast, the cost of making movies in Hollywood is often much higher.
It’s not uncommon for large-scale movies, such as in the Mission Impossible franchise, to have spectacular overseas backdrops where the plot is set.
There’s also more to it than just filming—movie production is a long process and takes a village to turn into the final product we watch at home or in theatres. Production houses work with talent across countries for various tasks at the post-production stage, which entails editing, sound design, CGI, and more.
It’ll prove tricky to tariff some parts of the process and not others, especially when there’s not always a clear way to track which steps of the overall production process take place in the U.S. or overseas.
Take the U.K. for example. Film and high-end TV production spend in the country was £5.6 billion ($7.4 billion) in 2024, up 31% from 2023, according to the British Film Institute (BFI). A vast majority of what was spent came from the U.S.
“While this announcement is clearly concerning, we need to understand the detail surrounding the proposed tariffs,” Adrian Wootton OBE, the chief executive of BFI, told Fortune in a statement. “We will be meeting with [the] Government and our industry policy group in the coming days to discuss further. The U.K. and U.S. have long enjoyed a strong, shared history of film-making, recently celebrating 100 years of creative collaboration and production.”
Bectu, the British union representing workers in the media industry, said tariffs “could deal a knock-out blow to an industry that is only just recovering and will be really worrying news for tens of thousands of skilled freelancers who make films in the U.K.”
The U.K. just signed a trade deal with the U.S., and there are already “active discussions” on the subject of tariffs on film production.
The silver-lining, as Disney’s CFO Hugh Johnston pointed out in a CNBC interview this week, is that Trump wants to help the film sector.
“What I was actually most encouraged by was the President talked about the fact that he wants to help the industry and he wants to make the industry stronger,” he said.
For now, however, there are more questions than answers on the tariffs that might follow.
