Trump announces 100% tariffs on movies ‘produced in foreign lands’

I know the US better than many parts of Germany

I read an article years ago from a lawyer (might have been a judge) complaining that, thanks to US TV and movies, people in Sweden know more about how the US justice system works than the Swedish system. Far too many people just fall back on their US TV knowledge of how they think courts work and that they keep having to explain to the people that, no that's not how things works in Sweden.

There was a claim at one point that, due to the popularity of American TV shows in Europe, during household emergencies kids were calling 911 instead of the local version (e.g. it's 999 in some European countries)

Maybe Germany should have imposed 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign lands :D

MAGA has several mutually exclusive tenets:

- Isolationism

- Increase US influence worldwide

- Exploit US influence worldwide

Each one will have a negative effect on the other two.

This is actually surprisingly a pro-union move by Trump.

If you aren't aware, they've shipped most IATSE jobs to Serbia since 2023.

They used to shoot most Disney and Netflix shows in LA and Atlanta. Now they're happening in Eastern Europe. They fly the cast out and film with crews that don't have labor laws or unions and that are an order of magnitude cheaper.

IATSE members have been forced to leave the industry, sell their homes, and move out of California. There are a few holdouts, but it's likely they'll have to exit the industry too.

Once that capacity goes, it'll never come back.

Studios are sitting vacant. CBRE is going to come in and turn them all into office parks and mixed use.

its very likely to cause reciprocal tariffs though, and exports of Hollywood way out weigh the imports of foreign films

> This tariff isn't an attack on Hollywood. This helps actors and staff in the Hollywood area.

Does it, though? I mean, the Trump administration is only making it more expensive for theaters to screen non-US movies. Are you going to even bother going to a cinema if the movie you wanted to see isn't made available? And how dominant are non-US productions in US cinemas?

It sounds like more tarrif bullshit,where the only output is lose-lose.

Everyone in this thread is reading surface level media summaries.

This is 1000% pro-union.

IATSE workers have been decimated by the move of productions to Serbia since 2023.

LA and Atlanta film productions have all but collapsed since the offshoring of production. Serbian crews work without unions for much cheaper than local IATSE members.

This is designed to save IATSE and domestic American production.

When American workers are forced to compete with slaves or vastly unsafe workplaces, something was going to break.

Who would have guessed that Idiocracy was an optimistic look at our possible future...

Gatorade to water the plants? Not a far fetch from injecting bleach to cure Covid.

It's worse than that. In the movie Idiocracy, they were searching for the smartest man alive to put him in charge to fix things. That's not what governments are doing now.

Just rewatched this for thr first time in a decade the other day. I have some serious concerns lmao

You may have missed that Idiocracy is a pro-eugenics film, in which the populace got stupider by way of being fecund. It's not about this problem, really.

You think a PhD automatically makes someone a better teacher than a school teacher? Shows quite an elitism that assumes knowledge and scholarly ability is the mark of a good teacher. From someone who actually taught in schools, scholarship matters almost zero, classroom management and emotional intelligence are far more important in a school teacher.

And giving away the money? You’d lose all amenities of a school, the building, its land, the social benefits of school interactions, etc. Most importantly, you lose classroom management of a teacher, and the kids lose out big time.

A PhD tutor stood in front of determinedly mischevious children, most couldn’t last two weeks.

idk man last time France raised the gas price by like 10% people were in the streets every weekend for a year, often blocking highways, warehouses, at its peak ~3 million people were in the streets, they got so close to Macron's castle he had his helicopter prepared to flee the capital

It ended up with 11 deaths, thousands of injured, thousands of people were arrested hundreds went to jail. Look at Serbia, Greece, damn even Turkey seems to put a better fight lol

https://www.ledauphine.com/france-monde/2018/12/13/gilets-ja...

If this happened here in Canada, I would go to weekly protests against this administration. When I was younger I went to dozens of daily protest for something insignificant in comparison [1] and it did lead to a change of gouvernement.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Quebec_student_protests

Impeachment. There have been multiple clearly impeachable offences by the current administration. The congress GOP should take responsibility for getting the US out of this.

Look at Georgia, look at Serbia, look at the Arab Spring. Look at your constitution! There is a part in there about resistance to oppression you seem to only use to defend the wrong things.

Look at Spain right now. Not sure I agree with the anti tourism cause but man they know how to cause a fuss.

General strike, for example.

Something like OWS - but outside the Whitehouse?

For context, much of the research that led to microprocessor came from outside the US. In particular, the invention of silicon gates comes from Italy.

I don't think that there is much risk of foreign researchers moving to the US in the current climate.

The italian Federico Faggin invented the microprocessor at Intel. He studied physics at Padua University in Italy.

In addition to the other comments pointing out how your "Americans invented microprocessors" is wrong,

> [Americans] landed on the moon without a federal Department of Education

maybe you should check what the budget for NASA was during the space race and what it is now, considering also the news from 3 days ago about further budget cuts to the Agency.

So let me get this straight... he's not happy with the UK because of VAT (value added tax) and he's also not happy with the UK because of tax breaks?

Amazing.

There will be exceptions and loopholes for friends, like e.g. for Tesla cars.

For now, there is no executive order or anything, so what he means by 'produced in' is anyone guess. Might also be just an announcement that will not end up in anything concrete. Wouldn't be the first time, wouldn't be the last.

Then I misunderstood, I guess...

Why would it be more expensive to produce it in the US, then? I thought one of the reasons for making the movie "abroad" was to get some subsidies from other countries "if you film it here", kind of.

To be fair, even the EU can be expected to enact regulations calibrated to decrease American dominance in the tech sector at this point. So if Trump tariffs don’t take down US software. I’m certain new regulations around the world will take US software down in any case.

Vancouver and Toronto were very often used as stand-ins for shows based in places like Chicago, Seattle, NYC and many others. Might still be, but I barely consume that sort of media nowadays.

It made watching TV shows like Stargate SG1 additionally amusing though -- every planet they visited was basically some location near Vancouver. Me and friends used to joke about how much like carcinisation is a thing in evolution, in the Stargate universe all planets eventually ended up looking like British Columbia.

> E.g. Vancouver used to be (potentially still is) a common production location.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ojm74VGsZBU

When you say often, how much in % of all movies are not produced in US?

That's what this is about.

Work for IATSE crew union members has declined precipitously.

During the pandemic, there was so much demand for content that the studios spent a lot of money teaching foreign crews how to produce films. They sent a lot of staff to Eastern Europe and Asia to train local crews. Serbia, etc., where the crews are making well below union wages and can work long hours without regulation.

Since 2023, 60% or so of productions have vacated LA, Atlanta, and New York in favor of being shot overseas. They just fly the cast out. It's significantly cheaper than filming at home.

IATSE membership is being decimated. Lots of folks have moved out of California because the jobs just aren't there anymore.

I didn't realize how many bad movies Italy produces, or at least produced, until I started living there in the late 1990s. Italians often go to the movies every week, and I did too, and then I realized that for every 'Life is Sweet', there were 50 dire entries that were just well-targeted enough to make their money back from a native audience. You'll never have heard of these movies, and rightly so.

Having lived in other countries since, this appears to be a common syndrome. You can't just a country by its tourists, and you certainly can't judge it by the small number of movies that get past its border control.

I hope you're not just advocating for those really bad Marvel movies with which the USA is flooding the film market with stinking manure?

Hollywood undoubtedly has more money, but you genuinely have no idea what you're talking about when it comes to the quality of what gets made.

So many things that hollywood produces are remakes of foreign movies, except with an order of magnitude more money poured in and palate-switched for american audiences. (which, due to the sheer volume of content that comes out of hollywood- becomes the default international palate).

The entertainment industry in Sweden (girl with the dragon tattoo, a man called Otto) and the UK (the countries I have lived in) is undoubtedly very strong, even comparatively poor (not intended as a slur here) India is quite famous for its bombastic action movies.

Russia too, has some of the most thought provoking movies that I've ever seen. Leviathan and Durak- they even have your "fun" action style movies (Brat and Brat 2 for fantastic examples).

To say that Hollywood produces more and thus sometimes better, and that other counties make slop betrays two things:

1) Hollywood steals vigorously from other countries.

2) Other countries produce works that do not translate well for american audiences.

This is a remarkable statement when Fellini and Kieślowski exist.

Ah yes, the 'slop, melodramatic vaudeville, or tear-jerking gut-punches' of Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Wong Ching-Po, Stephen Chow, John Woo, Emin Alper, Win Wenders, Pedro Almodóvar, Sylvain Chomet, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Jacques Demy, Lee Chang-dong, Shunji Iwai, Wai Keung Lau, Wong Kar-wai, Hirokazu Koreeda, Park Chan-wook, Tran Anh Hung, Nadine Labaki, Santiago Mitre, ...

Yes, the US is a wealthy country, with a big population, a healthy movie industries and a lot of consumer. It does mean that the US produce a lot of movies, from auteur movie to holywood blockbuster. Disproportionally more than any other country in the world. But dismissing every non-US movie industry just show your ignorance about cinema in general.

> That's not what this is about.

Of course. It's clearly about the fentanyl emergency.

Well these were the words from the horse's mouth:

“This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat,” Trump said in the Truth Social post. “It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”

To me this seems to motivate the tariffs as a battle against foreign propaganda.

Finally: movie adaptions of paris are done in vegas.

So movie tickets go up either way.