Donald Trump’s idea of movie tariffs was presented to him by Jon Voight, in a document called ‘Make Hollywood Great Again’.
It didn’t take a lot of dot joining to work out where Donald Trump’s announcement over the weekend came from. That’ll be the announcement of 100 percent tariffs on movies not made in America, that he decided to unload onto the world via his social media platform.
One of his three special envoys to Hollywood, actor Jon Voight, had popped along to see Trump and deliver his action plan over the weekend. It’s five pages long, so it’s unclear whether the US President has gone through it all. But skip to page two of the document, entitled ‘Make Hollywood Great Again’, and there’s a clause that notes:
‘If a US based production ‘could have been produced in the US’, but the producer elects to produce in a foreign country and receives a production tax incentive therefor [sic], a tariff will be placed on that production equal to 120% of the value of the foreign incentive received.’
As such, if Marvel gets a generous tax break for making Avengers: Doomsday in the UK, then it’ll have to pay that, plus 20 percent, to the US government.
‘This is not meant as a penalty, but a necessary step to ‘level the playing field’, while not creating a never-ending cycle of chasing the highest incentive.’
Voight’s document, published at Deadline, does move on to discuss production treaties with foreign countries on its third page, and recommends that the first treaty be negotiated with the UK, which will then be used as the model for further deals.
There’s something interesting stuff in the document, not least returning ownership of work to independent American producers. This is targeting streamers, who insist a lot of the time on 100 percent ownership of a production. In fairness, addressing this looks like an interesting step, but it’s unclear – given that it’s three pages in – whether Trump has interest in this.
Instead, he’s thus far zeroed in on a more simplistic interpretation of the tariff idea that Voight and his team have put forward, and we’ve had two days of chaos as a result. There’s little sign that the later detail has been digested or taken on board. I’d say that devil will be in the detail of Trump’s ultimate tariff decision, but conversely, there’s little sign that there’s going to be much detail.
In the meantime, the chaos rumbles on…
