The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Jennifer Saba

NEW YORK, May 5 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Lights, camera, taxes! President Donald Trump on Sunday said that he wants to make Hollywood great again by slapping tariffs on movies made outside of the United States. If that happens, other countries could easily retaliate – a big risk to a powerhouse exporter. It’s a special preview of a grim picture: a spiraling trade war that goes far beyond manufacturing.

Earlier this year, Trump appointed actors Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone to be “Special Ambassadors” to the “great, but very troubled” land of Hollywood. Voight has been vocal about what he sees as the harm wrought by productions leaving the Los Angeles environs for other, cheaper pastures.

Trump’s social-media declaration that he wants to initiate a 100% import duty on films that are “coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands” picks up that lament in dramatic fashion. Whether Tinsel Town productions remain onshore is a big question for local economies: studios spend $22 million per location shoot in the United States, according to the Motion Picture Association. And major blockbusters are indeed skipping abroad. This year’s “A Minecraft Movie,” for instance, was shot in New Zealand.

Los Angeles, specifically, was home to 22% fewer days of shooting in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the year prior, according to FilmLA. But that results from a tangle of factors. Wildfires disrupted schedules, studios are still grappling with the impact of a strike by actors and screenwriters, and streaming giants like HBO Max are pulling back on content spending.

A White House spokesperson said that no final decisions have been made, including how import fees would be levied. A film may be written in Los Angeles, shot in Croatia, and edited in New York. How to figure out the value of the overseas content and charge for it is unclear.

The bigger danger, though, is that a weakened industry is destabilized by tit-for-tat measures escalating between the U.S. and other countries, as has threatened to happen in other industries. Between 2017 and 2021, pandemic-ravaged global box office ticket sales halved to $21 billion, according to the MPA. Yet they still dwarfed U.S. revenue of $4.5 billion. The United States exports three times more films than it imports, representing 6% of its trade surplus in services, the industry association reckons. If other countries put, say, a tax on tickets to see U.S. films, or on American streaming services like Disney+, that lucre is in danger. As Trump’s trade war expands beyond steel and cars, it’s shaping up to be a horror show for industries that represent the country’s real trade strengths.

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CONTEXT NEWS

President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social on May 4 that he had authorized the Department of Commerce to begin the process of instituting a 100% tariff on movies “coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”

(Editing by Jonathan Guilford and Maya Nandhini)

((For previous columns by the author, Reuters customers can click on SABA/jennifer.saba@thomsonreuters.com))