In January 2025, Donald Trump appointed Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone as his Hollywood envoys. What happened next? It was a year ago this week that Donald Trump decided to temporarily be distracted by the world of Hollywood. He decreed, in a post on his own social network site, that he was appointing ... One year on, what happened to Donald Trump’s special envoys to Hollywood?
In January 2025, Donald Trump appointed Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone as his Hollywood envoys. What happened next?
It was a year ago this week that Donald Trump decided to temporarily be distracted by the world of Hollywood. He decreed, in a post on his own social network site, that he was appointing Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight as his ‘special ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California.’
He continued, declaring that ‘They will serve as Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!’
Coincidentally, the trio had also backed Trump – who’s in the Epstein files – in his election campaign, but also, the-then President-elect hadn’t gone to the trouble of informing them of his plan. Instead, he jabbed letters into his phone with his bruised hand, hit send, and presumably waited to see how it played out.
The one to immediately respond was Mel Gibson, a man it’d be fair to say is not shy in the slightest from controversy. “I heed the call,” he said.
But what difference have the three made in their year since they were singled out by Trump to bring Hollywood back? Well, let’s take a look.
Sylvester Stallone
The Rhinestone star has needed to pop to Ikea to get a new shelf recently, having been awarded a Kennedy Center Honoree prize back in December. He said “we peaked” on receiving the award. Trump hosted the awards, with fellow recipients that evening including Gene Simmons, Michael ‘Frank Spencer’ Crawford and Gloria Gaynor.
That said, Stallone hasn’t had much time to save Hollywood per se, given his ongoing commitment to the TV series Tulsa King. He’s also been lending his backing to AI company Largo.Ai, and his Balboa Productions continues to explore new projects.
Specific to the task that Trump set Stallone, he added his name to a letter asking the President for new tax measures and federal tax incentives to help lure production back to the US. But as the White House’s Kush Desai responded to the Los Angeles Times, “official policy positions will be announced by President Trump and President Trump only.”
Trump has not announced just incentives however, and countries elsewhere around the world continue to lure American productions, thanks to more aggressive tax breaks.
Instead, he’s at times threatened tariffs on the movies of other nations, but backed away from them. It seems that the threat of tariffs has not led to people being more inclined to make their films and TV shows in Hollywood.
Mel Gibson
He might have been the first to respond to Donald Trump’s proclamation, but of the three 70+ white men that the Commander In Chief selected for his Hollywood mission, Mel Gibson seems to be – from the outside looking in – the one less concentrated on the task in hand.
Instead, he’s focusing very much on his career.
He kicked off 2025, you might remember, by releasing Flight Risk, a tepidly-received thriller that barely made a scratch at the box office. Most of his time appears to have been put towards getting his two-part The Resurrection Of The Christ funded and into production, and he’s now working on the new feature. The budget is set to be nine figures, and Gibson is directing again. Jim Caviezel seems to have decided he’s had enough of being Jesus for Mel, and the role has been recast. The two parts of the movie will be released six weeks apart, in the first half of 2027.
Gibson is demonstrating how eagerly he’d heeded Donald Trump’s call to bring production back to Hollywood by shooting his new films in, well, Italy.
He also booked a role in the thriller Coyote. That, though, appears to have filmed closer to home. Only parts of that are believed to have been shot in Mexico and Italy, the rest in the States.
Given that Gibson’s filmmaking commitments though are now pretty much block booked for a good 18 months, he’s unlikely to find much time to get productions back to Hollywood. In fairness, that’d be quite tricky to do from Italy anyway.
Jon Voight
The one of the three appointees who seems to have been most motivated to actually do what Trump asked is Voight. Sure, he doesn’t appear to have booked much acting work this year, but he’s 88 this December, and instead he has news programmes to appear on, bemoaning who New Yorkers elected as their mayor.
Still, Voight met up with unions and executives in and around the film business as part of his response to Trump, although it looks like he did this independently of Stallone and Gibson. Voight is believed to have presented ideas for tax incentives and such like, a fairly obvious but likely effective solution for the drain of production work from Los Angeles.
He does appear to have been working on the understanding that Trump might engage with his efforts.
While there were reports of a meeting taking place at the end of last year putting proposals to Trump, again there’s been no actual noise from the White House beyond the initial post that triggered all of this off.
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And that was just over a year ago. Since then, Stallone has preened while being presented with a medal, Gibson has buggered off to Italy to make two films, and Voight has taken meetings but seems to have made precisely zero difference so far.
In fact, at the end of 2025 The Hollywood Reporter was suggesting that Los Angeles had recorded a 16% drop in production shoot days compared to 2024, and that must obviously be fake news or something, because that fact can’t possibly be true. The local Californian legislature is enacting regional policies to try and reverse the trend, but it’s unclear if Messrs Gibson, Voight and Stallone were involved.
Perhaps Trump should look at some different ambassadors. Brett Ratner might be able to fit a few meetings in, before he heads off for Rush Hour 4…
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