Trump’s proposed film tariff – bluff or real?

It’s been three weeks since President Trump said he was instructing the Department of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative to implement a 100% tariff on all films coming into the country that are produced “in foreign lands”. In an online post, Trump said the US film industry was “dying a very fast death” as filmmakers and studios were being lured overseas by incentives.

Whether or not the US industry is dying ‘very fast’ is moot. Even if it is suffering, it is demonstrably the case that the availability of overseas incentives is not the only cause of the US industry’s problems. Overspending on ill-judged projects such as “Snow White”, the ongoing consequences of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, the effect of the recent LA fires and the increasing fracturing of the market are all playing a part.

The key question for British and other non-US producers is how such a tariff, if it is introduced, will affect them? UK facilities such as Shepperton and Pinewood are continuously used by Hollywood for big budget productions. The spend on these productions makes extensive use of British creatives as well as crew. However, does this make a US studio-produced “Barbie” or “Jurassic Park” a British film or, for the purposes of a proposed US tariff, a ‘foreign’ film? By contrast, is a film wholly made in the USA but bankrolled, even in part, by non-US financiers or hedge funds that manage the funds of non-US investors, an American film?

At this stage, no one has any idea what a tariff would mean. Immediate reactions from industry insiders have been as much informed by emotion as they have by analysis. The announcement itself is born of the same disruptor style of policy-declaration as other pronouncements from President Trump. It’s a pronouncement that isn’t a policy, a statement without anything substantial backing it up - at least for the time being.

As with other such pronouncements, it’s a stone chucked into the middle of a pond, and it won’t be until the ripples have reached the pond’s edge will anything choate emerge. Perhaps the most apposite comment was made by Wes Anderson, who quipped: “Can you hold up a movie in customs? It doesn’t ship that way.”

With Washington occupied with numerous other priorities it’s a reasonable bet that no formal policy will emerge for at least a while – if it does at all – and that such a policy will necessarily need to address and resolve the obvious contradictions engendered by what seems, at least for now, to be not much more than an off-the-cuff utterance.