Authored by Beige Luciano-Adams via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
After the initial shockwaves subsided over President Donald Trump’s May 5 announcement that he intends to implement a 100 percent levy on all foreign-made films, Hollywood labor unions ventured cautious optimism at the idea that at least someone in Washington might be paying attention to the plight of the industry’s rank-and-file workers.
“President Trump has correctly recognized that the American film and television industry faces an urgent threat from international competition,” leaders of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), one of the largest and most powerful entertainment unions, said in a statement.
“Foreign governments have successfully lured film and television productions, and the multitude of jobs they create, away from the United States with aggressive tax incentives and subsidies. Films intended for initial release in the U.S. are increasingly being shot overseas—and American workers and our economy are paying the price.”
The entertainment industry has taken an unrelenting beating over the past several years—streaming wars, the pandemic, mergers and layoffs, strikes, and accelerating runaway production have gutted the industry, leaving record numbers without work and little hope of a rebound. Runaway productions generally refer to productions intended for release or broadcast in the United States but actually filmed in another country, or those made by L.A.-based studios that shoot in other states in order to take advantage of competitive tax incentives or other economic benefits.
Calling incentives offered to lure production overseas a “concerted effort” by other nations and thus a national security threat, the president said he was authorizing the Department of Commerce and the U.S. trade representative to immediately begin instituting 100 percent tariffs on “any and all movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.”
How exactly tariffs on foreign films would work—or really what even constitutes an American-made or foreign-made film in the age of streaming, co-production and globalized post-production—is yet to be determined.
Unlike most of Trump’s trade-related actions thus far, this latest salvo targets not physical goods that come through U.S. ports, but digitally transmitted services that rely on an increasingly international supply chain.
There are also questions surrounding the legality of imposing tariffs on film and television under what appears to be Trump’s invocation of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which offers broad powers to regulate economic transactions such as sanctions and tariffs during national emergencies, but protects the exchange of published information or informational materials, including films.
The impulse, at least, was appreciated among representatives of Hollywood’s beleaguered workforce.
In a statement, the Teamsters applauded the apparent intent to push back against the years-long hollowing out of the industry, which the union blamed on studios that follow “Corporate America’s crooked playbook” of outsourcing union jobs.
“Studios chase cheap production costs overseas while gutting the American workforce that built the film and TV industry. These gigantic corporations line their pockets by relentlessly cutting corners, abandoning American crews, and exploiting tax loopholes,” Teamsters President Sean M. O’Brien and Motion Picture Division Director Lindsey Dougherty said in the statement.
The union’s motion picture and theatrical division represents drivers and transportation professionals, as well as casting directors, animal wranglers, and other crafts.
“We thank President Trump for boldly supporting good union jobs when others have turned their heads. This is a strong step toward finally reining in the studios’ un-American addiction to outsourcing our members’ work. The Teamsters applaud any elected official—Republican, Democrat, Independent—who’s willing to fight for American workers,” they said.
The president’s missive appeared to address the fact that an increasing number of American studio films are shot abroad—primarily in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and European countries such as Hungary, which offer competitive subsidies and tax breaks, easy regulatory environments, and lower labor costs for producers trying to deliver a project on budget.
IATSE, which represents members in the United States and Canada, also struck a cautious tone, saying it supports all policy measures “that can be implemented to return and maintain U.S. film and television jobs, while not disadvantaging our Canadian members.”
IATSE urged federal policymakers to level the playing field for U.S. productions, including with a federal film production tax incentive, but said it would await further information about the administration’s proposed tariff plan. “We continue to stand firm in our conviction that any eventual trade policy must do no harm to our Canadian members—nor the industry overall.”
In a recent survey by industry analyst ProdPro, studio executives named their top five preferred locations for 2025–26, and none of them were in the United States.
Toronto, the U.K, Vancouver, Central Europe, and Australia dominated the list, with U.S. hubs California, Georgia, and New Jersey ranked below them.
“Key factors influencing these preferences include favorable tax incentives, infrastructure, available skilled crew, and currency exchange rate,” the report said, noting an increasingly competitive market of tax incentive schemes will likely shape geographic distribution for years to come.
The company’s 2024 Second Quarter Global Production Report shows the total number of productions filming globally last year was still 16 percent lower than in 2022, and 37 percent lower in the United States.
“The lower volumes are here to stay,” the report notes, showing the number of U.S. productions that started principal photography in the second quarter of 2024 fell nearly 40 percent from 2022 levels, compared with a 20 percent global dip.
Amid this ongoing global decline and sharp competition, filming in Los Angeles, the industry’s historic center, continued to tumble through the first quarter of this year. According to FilmLA, a nonprofit and the official film office of L.A. City and County, on-location production in the Greater Los Angeles area dropped by 22 percent in the first quarter of this year, with feature production declining about 29 percent.
“Each drop reflected the impact of global production cutbacks and California’s ongoing loss of work to rival territories,” the organization said in an April statement.
There is no central database or reliable way to track runaway production, which has been a subject of concern for Hollywood unions for at least the past two decades. But in the industry, many observe it has accelerated over the past five or so years at an unprecedented rate.
‘Built by the Middle Class’
Other union leaders cautioned against a blanket tariff that fails to account for the realities of the industry.
“If this tariff policy is just a headline reaction to productions leaving the U.S., it’s not a solution, it’s sabotage,” David Graves, an executive board member with IATSE Local 728, which represents studio electrical lighting technicians, told The Epoch Times in a text message.
Stressing that the film industry doesn’t run on the same timeline or structure as a brick-and-mortar business, Graves said a one-size-fits-all approach may do more harm than good unless informed by people who work in the industry.
“If the administration truly wants to understand how to apply tariffs to the American film industry, they need to talk to electricians, grips, camera operators, and wardrobe, not just A-list actors who are disconnected from the realities of payroll taxes, foreign incentives, and what economic contraction looks like on the ground,” Graves said.
Big-name producers and celebrity voices, he said, “don’t speak for the working-class crews who are watching their livelihoods disappear with no transition plan, no retraining support, and no safety net.”
A day after Trump’s tariff announcement, Oscar-winning actor Jon Voight, whom Trump previously named a “special ambassador” to Hollywood, said in a video posted to social media platform X that he submitted a detailed plan to the president at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida outlining “certain tax provisions” that would help both movie and TV production.
“Our industry recently has suffered greatly. … Many Americans have lost jobs to productions gone overseas. People have lost their homes, can’t feed their families,” Voight said.
The same day, Deadline, an industry publication based in Los Angeles, published a draft of Voight’s “Make Hollywood Great Again” proposal, which includes a 10 percent to 20 percent federal tax credit that would be “stackable” on top of available state incentives already provided by states like New York and Georgia.
In an emailed statement to The Epoch Times, Steven Paul, an advisor to Voight and CEO of SP Media Group, said the document published by Deadline was “part of a private discussion and was never intended for public consumption.”
The proposal was crafted “solely for the purpose of discussion,” Paul said, and didn’t reflect any formal policy or position. And while the ideas listed were gathered from exploratory conversations Voight and Paul had with a broad range of industry stakeholders, including unions, studios and streaming platforms, Paul said the leaked proposal “does not claim to represent the collective views of the participating film and television organizations.”
Voight’s draft plan requires that 75 percent of physical production and post-production take place in the United States in order to qualify for the federal incentive, and must meet a minimum threshold “American ‘Cultural Test’ similar to that currently used in the U.K.’”
All of this would apply to content across the board, including for theatrical distribution, broadcast networks and cable, as well as streaming services such as Netflix and Amazon, and digital platforms such as YouTube.
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