WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump said Monday he will impose a 100% tariff on movies made outside the United States.
In a post on Truth Social, he said, “Our movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing ‘candy from a baby.’”
California has been especially hard hit, he said, singling out Gov. Gavin Newsom as “weak and incompetent.” He said the tariff was necessary “to solve this long time, never ending problem.”
Trump did not say when or how the tariff could be enacted. It would be the first time he has essentially imposed a tariff on a service rather than a good.
Newsom’s press office responded to Trump’s announcement on X, saying, “The Governor tried to explain this to Trump months ago — when this was initially proposed — that his actions will cause irreparable damage to the U.S. film industry. Today’s move is 100% stupid.”
The post linked to a story from The Hill in May with the headline “Hollywood studios’ stocks fall after Trump foreign film tariff vow.”
Parsing the data on how many global feature films are made in the United States is tricky, according to film industry data researcher Stephen Follows. Many films are produced in multiple countries, and there is no system in place to track it, Follows wrote on his website in May, after Trump first proposed the idea of a 100% tariff on foreign-made films. At that time, the president described such films as a national security threat.
Like many manufactured goods, Follows said films are made with a global supply chain that is further convoluted by streamers such as Netflix, making a movie’s country of origin unclear. In addition, American studios routinely back films from foreign markets, Follows said.
The major Hollywood studios made 87.3% of global feature films in 2024, according to StephenFollows.com, but crunching country-of-origin data from IMDb since 2000, the analyst found American films made up about a third of all international feature films.
The U.S. ranks first for global movie productions, followed by India, the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada, Follows said, adding that the 200 top-grossing movies filmed since 2000 were shot in 1.6 countries. According to Follows, 23.9% of films that listed the U.S. as the country of origin on IMDb had shot at least one day in the U.K. or Canada.
Imposing a 100% tariff on foreign-made films would require a new system to define what makes a film “American,” he said.
The Motion Picture Association did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Trump’s post, but the trade group has previously said that three times as many U.S. films are exported than foreign films are imported to the U.S.
In July, California expanded its film and television tax credit program for projects that shoot in the state from $330 million to $750 million. Intended to stem the tide of TV and movie programs leaving Hollywood to shoot elsewhere, the expanded credit has so far lured 22 new television projects, Newsom’s office said last month.
According to the nonprofit Los Angeles film permitting group FilmLA, just one in five TV shows and movies are currently filmed in Los Angeles — a city that is home to Hollywood and was long the center of the industry. But rising costs, incentives that failed to keep up with other states and countries, and the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes have created a perfect storm for productions to flee.
A recent FilmLA report found that on-location filming in Los Angeles fell 6.2% in the second quarter of 2025 compared with the same period a year earlier.
FilmLA noted that shooting days for feature films were down 21.4% compared with the same quarter in 2024 but were up 22.6% compared with the first quarter of 2025.
The decline in productions has major economic consequences for California, which on its own is the fourth largest economy in the world.
The California Production Coalition estimates the average location shoot adds $670,000 and 1,500 jobs per day to the local economy. There are about 10,500 entertainmeent-related businesses in the state, according to a report from Beacon Economics.
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