Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Insane New Tariffs on… Movies?

Episode Date: May 5, 2025

JVL, Sonny Bunch, and Andrew Egger break down Donald Trump's recent Truth Social bleat proposing 100% tariffs on all films "produced in Foreign Lands." The announcement has confused the industry by what it means, how it would work, and why Trump thinks creating more obstacles in an industry still recovering from strikes and COVID would help Hollywood.  Read More in The Bulwark's Morning Shots

Hey everybody, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. Donald Trump's in his brainstorming era recently. He's just getting on true social all hours of the day and night. Hot new ideas straight from the dome. Here's one he put up yesterday while we were all finishing up Sunday dinner. The movie industry in America is dying a very fast death. Other countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood and many other areas within the USA are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other nations and therefore a national security threat.

It is in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda. Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce and the United States Trade Representative to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% tariff on any and all movies coming into our country that are produced in foreign lands. We want movies made in America again.

We had to come on and talk about this. I am joined by basically our two movie gurus, Sonny Bunch and JVL. Sonny, you wrote for this in Morning Shots today. This is a lot of words that, as far as we can tell, add up to literally no even imaginable policy, right? Can you just like walk us through the contours of what smarter minds than me imagine it could in theory mean? Sure. So let's steel man. I'm going to steel man Donald Trump's argument for him because I don't think he has any idea what he's actually talking about. Once upon a time, the movies in America were made largely in Los Angeles, in Hollywood, right? Good weather,

and that's where the talent was. And then as the years went along, production started moving out into the rest of the country, into locations where you had good spaces, you had wide open vistas, or you had industrial plants that you wanted to use, whatever. But also because there were tax incentives, right? So if you've ever wondered why, for instance, so many Walter Hill movies in the 1970s and 80s are shot in New Orleans, it's not because he loves New Orleans. I mean, I think he does like New Orleans, but it's not just because he loves New Orleans. It's because there were really good tax incentives in Louisiana. So other states did this. Michigan has done this. Most recently, Georgia did this. There is a huge production hub in Georgia or there had been until very recently. That's where most of the Marvel stuff was shot, for instance. Right. If you've ever watched a Marvel movie and the end credits, there's a Georgia peach.

Thanks to the state of Georgia for the generous tax credits. Well, Marvel has moved from Georgia. They moved from Georgia to London because London has now offered the best tax credits. There are many. You're saving an enormous amount of money, tens of millions of dollars to shoot in London right now versus what you had been saving in Georgia and elsewhere. And you can do this with these big budget movies because they're all basically shot in what they call the volume, the LED volume or in warehouses with green screens like you don't actually need to be in a place. You can do it. You can do it more or less anywhere. So the theory here is that these are uncompetitive tax advantages that foreign nations are using to destroy the homegrown American film industry.

Again, that that is the argument. If that is the argument, then there are different there are different things you can do to, you know, improve the the the standing here. You can offer your own tax credits. You can you can make things you can make it easier to get permits in Los Angeles, whatever. Tariffs are not how you do it because, and this is what everyone I, everyone I have talked to today in the industry and kind of around the industry has said is, what is he, what, what are you tariffing?

They're, they don't even know what the actual tariffs are. Are you tariffing? Do you, is it a good or a service? Well, that's, that's the trouble. Well, we'll get in, We'll get into this in a second, because if it's if if the if the administration is levying tariffs on services, that creates a very bad thing for very large industries in America that have been pretty supportive of Donald Trump so far. We'll get into that in one second. But, you know, so like you say,

he says 100 percent tariff on films that are shot overseas. What does that mean? Does that mean that 100 percent tariff on the budget of the picture? So a movie like Avengers Doomsday, right, shooting in England, right, just started shooting in Great Britain right now. That movie cost 300 million dollars, let's say. I don't know what the actual number is. Let's just say 300 million dollars. Does that mean is a 100% tariff on that film, a $300 million tax bill for that they're going to send to Disney and Marvel and say, you got to pay this before you can show the movie to anyone before you can sell ticket number one? I don't know. Nobody knows. Is it a tariff on just the tax rebate, right? So if they get $60 million back in tax money from Great Britain, however that breaks down,

does the studio then own $60 million? All right, who knows? Sonny, could it be a tariff on the ticket sales for just that movie? So when you go to AMC, your ticket for Avengers Doomsday costs twice what the tickets for everything else costs. So this is another possibility, right? That you do it on a ticket-by-ticket basis. You put this on the onus on the consumer.

You just say to the consumer, and AMC, it should be noted, AMC Theaters, Regal Cinemas, wherever, Alamo Drafthouse, if you go to see a movie that we have designated as filmed in another country you owe uh there's a 100 surcharge on your and then it gets into a question of like okay what does it actually mean what does it mean to film in another country right like mission the mission impossible movies those film all over the world but would we describe those as a foreign i think it's very straightforward sunny it's like with your car where there is a detailed accounting for each part and the country of origin of each part so that when you look at

the your car it says you know x for 17 of parts from mexico 15 parts from south korea that's how it should be for shooting it should be by number of frames of film. By percentage of frames. In the final cut. So the percentage of frames in the final cut where they were filmed. And for movies which have animation, computer animation in them, I think that should be billed by the country

that the computer animators were sitting in while they built the computer animation scenes. Yeah. I mean, it's just obvious to me. We're going right into it. We're going to have a new American cinematic labeling act to get us through all this stuff. Can I ask? Look, Sonny, I know you're steel manning this. There's another term for it, which I think you might call gilding the lily a little bit here, right? I mean, like, this is this is an insane tweet in a lot of ways and basically every way. But I did want to circle back around to that thing you guys were gesturing at just a minute ago and ask you JBL because this is kind of like a classic Trump thing, where it's like,

what a silly man, what a silly thought, wait a minute, there is actually like a really alarming potential, a new situation he could kind of just stumble into with this, which is opening the can of worms of tariffs on services, right, as opposed to just goods moving from country to country. So this is I mean, OK, so one more thing about the movies. Movies are conceived of years in advance. And so this this movie tariff thing is never going to happen. Trump is only in office. Let's just pretend he's only in office for three and a half more years.

The movies that are going to shoot in three and a half years are still at the pitch stage right now. These things take forever. The concern and the reason people are freaking out is not because of like what he's going to do to the movie industry, but because this opens up, hold on, if we're going to tax services, which would be what movie distribution is really, it isn't a good, it isn't a, he's not putting a tariff on the DVDs that you buy at Target, you know, which is a physical thing you can hold. Then America is a net exporter of services. We are a high tech information age economy. This is, I am sorry, I know there are people who just wish that their grandchildren could

grow up working in factories, screwing in little screws on iPhones, that this is their dearest wish for their progeny. But for most people, what you want to do is get into the information economy where you can make more money. And that's what America is good at. And so if all of a sudden, like Amazon Web Cloud Computing is something that can be taxed and tariffed, that opens up an entire other sector of the economy for Trump to turn into a command economy the way he has with the manufacture and sale of goods, which where

he is basically, as he said yesterday, he's with goods. He owns the department store and he is setting prices. And if he decides he wants to do that with services, too, yikes. Yeah. And not just and not just Trump, right? I mean, like this is also an area where, like you say, we're a massive net exporter. This is a place where other countries who are looking for pain points

in the currently existing trade war, if they were to start reaching for services, that would really start to pile up as economic damage quick. Sorry, I cut you off there, Sonny. Well, no, and like I look very specifically at the world of movies, right? In the world of movies, we are a net exporter of filmed entertainment to the entire world. The MPA, for 2023, the Motion Picture Association said that, I believe it was $15.3 billion. There were zero major foreign territories that we had a trade deficit

with when it comes to movies like the whole like, you know, the whole tariff thing that Trump is on about is because he doesn't understand what trade deficits are. He's he's he's a deranged person who doesn't who thinks that trade deficits mean a different thing than they actually mean. But even in his deranged world, we are a net expert. Like there is no trade deficit with movies. It does not exist. It does not exist. But again, like I, I'm just, I, I can't, I can't help but get hung up on the actual nuts and bolts of this thing because it's so bizarre. Like for instance, you have something like Netflix, right? So Netflix brings a lot of foreign movies over. Let's just use Amelia Perez as one example.

Amelia Perez is a movie that Netflix bought for $12 million. The French company that made it spent some other amount of money on the budget. It was filmed in France and Mexico. What do you put a tariff on for a Netflix movie like Amelia Perez? Do you charge Netflix an extra $12 million for the pickup costs?

Do you charge for whatever the production budget was? Was it 10 million, 15 million, whatever that was? Do you put a surcharge on Netflix accounts? Because lots of Netflix content is made overseas. But also, this only applies to films. So what if you call Amelia Perez a TV show? Is it then exempt from this? Is, it's it's it's it's a movie if it's streaming or is it only a movie if it's in a in a theater? Great question, JVL. Nobody knows. Nobody knows because this is an insane. It's an insane.

And look, here's the other thing is I think most people in Hollywood right now, there's a story in Hollywood Reporter today. That's like the Trump White House says something like we're still working on ideas. And the sense I get from everybody in Hollywood is that they are expecting this to go nowhere because it's so bizarre and hard to implement. And again, nobody understands what he means when he says 100% tariff. 100% tariff on what? What? I don't think this is it introduces uncertainty into the marketplace. There are movies that are starting to shoot right now or are going to shoot in like a month in London. Do those people do those companies then say, wait, hold on, are we going to shoot this here if we're going to get a surprise $400 million tax bill in in in 18 months when this movie is about to do? Like, what are we supposed to do? Nobody understands what this means, what the charges are, what the potential charges are, what the potential coverage liability is.

It's insane. It's an insane thing. Sonny, you don't get it, man. It's all art of the deal. Right. It's all art of the deal. Andrew, I got a question for you. So you've been writing for the last couple of weeks a lot about Trump's crown on crown off routine where he's like, I control everything.

I'm the God emperor. And then, you know, I couldn't possibly bring that guy back from El Salvador. I mean, I don't even know what my lawyers tell me to do. Right. of this with tariffs, where he has, as Sonny said, he has tended to explain tariffs as trade deficits. But now in movies, movies are a place where we have a trade surplus. And he's also saying that we need tariffs there. Does that suggest that maybe he's not as stupid as we think and that the trade deficit talk is just an excuse to go to a command economy, socialism, if you will? And it's not because he's stupid, but that's just like a rationalization he uses. And because he wants to control everything in the economy, he is willing to then ignore the trade surplus and talk about how bad

it is. You know, we need tariffs because they're not shooting everything on downstages in Burbank anymore. Yeah. And I don't even think it needs to be an either or question. Right. I mean, these are thoughts that flow in the same direction in the river of Trump's mind. Right. Where we're on the one hand, I think that it is pretty well established throughout the course of his life. He has always said the same stuff about tariffs and about trade deficits and stuff long before he ever wanted to get his own grubby little hands on the economy, right? Just as a matter of what he thinks would profit the US. It's this protectionism and it's all this free money because of the bizarre cockamamie way he thinks about how tariffs

operate and what their effects are. But at the same time, it is very clear that he has caught on to this secondary effect, which isn't even really a secondary effect for him anymore. It's just a both-and thing, right? He loves being the guy in the chair where everyone all around, anybody the tariffs touch, they have to come to him as a supplicant. They have to get down and grovel, please, sir, I need a little exemption for my factory, sir. And that's that's the thing he loves most in the world, right, is that. And it also kind of dovetails with just overall nostalgia about sort of the way things used to be like, we're giving you back Hollywood, guys. We're going to we're going to make it great again. We're going to make movies in America great again.

It also dovetails with just the fact that he has caught on to, I mean, he's a big guy for like get out of jail free cards or like cheat codes. One of these cheat codes that he has figured out is that he can put a tariff on anything if he says it's a national security threat. So that's right here in the tweet. Oh, right. He says movies are national security threats. Yeah, it's a national security threat, man. You don't even know. It seems like the wrong kind of mental model to think of him like balancing these things each other in his mind, because it all just is one thing. It's all

flowing. He's out here vibing. He has this idea. It hits all his pleasure centers. He's like, we're going to do it. We're just going to do it. We're going to make American movies great again. We're going to put it in the thing that Donald Trump makes the decision about. It'll be good for everybody. And that's just kind of how he sees it. I don't know. That's what I think. What do you think? I don't know. I mean, in a weird way, guys, one of the things that I think about here a lot is, I know it doesn't seem like they should be connected, but like biomedical research. So the Trump administration is killing another thing that America is very, very good at, biomedical research. But this is done under the auspices of Doge and shutting down NIH and all that. Again, it's going after a place where America is strong and has a strong competitive advantage

in addition to going after the places where you're like manufacturing. And it's the same thing. They're trying to blow everything up. But this under the guise of pure nihilism i think and that's that's where i just feel like i don't know like this guy is doing a thelma and louise thing except it's got the entire country like shoved into the trunk of the car yeah yeah man i'm so excited to find out uh which i mean the the one thing that kind of pulls me in a slightly different direction than that analysis is just that I think the guy's own confidence in his own ability to know, the hand of the market, that's fine. But like, wait until you see the Trump economy and it's going to, it's going to blow up. We're going to see returns like we've never seen. I'm going to get reelected in 2028 with 80% of the popular vote. You know, like that, I think these are the kinds of stories that he tells himself.

And, and, you know, I guess the question is like, if you are in the trunk of that car, how much does it actually matter whether the guy has a death wish or is like, no, trust me, this is going to be really great. You know, we're going to, we're going to go off the cliff and it's actually going to work out. Trust. I don't know. You guys have anything else you want to add on this before we take it home? I have one question for Sonny. Yeah. So you you seem like you're all outraged on general principle. But if Trump were to figure out a tariff scheme to favor physical media and encourage the production of physical media in America again, as opposed to streaming, you'd be into it, wouldn't you? Well, yeah, of course.

We need the physical media here. We need to make it here. We can't just make it in Germany and Mexico and everywhere else. We need the plants here. A thousand percent tariff on streaming of movies and tax breaks for the sale of Blu-ray 4K DVDs. That's the Sonny Bunch program. All I'm saying is that if he instituted some sort of drone program to go after the overseas piracy hubs,

I would have to look the other way for at least a little bit. Alright. We'll leave it there. You heard it here first, folks. Thanks, y'all, for watching.