Trump's speech about film duties makes no sense, but it already causes damage to Hollywood | film

Another day, another bizarre, mischief, hearing line from the US President.

Steve Bannon famous to him to make the zone flooded-a permanent revolution of the provocative, toxic nonsense. Trump floods the zone with tariffs, then he takes a break, goes back and climbs down on tariffs and then adds more tariffs. The latest is his bizarre plan to make films that were made in “Foreign Lands” with 100% tariffs. He has ceremoniously announced his serious concern that Hollywood “die” by foreigners such as Great Britain, which steered multinational tax benefits.

Huh? At the beginning of this second term, Trump revealed his three “Hollywood ambassadors”, his like-minded people of the canvas: Mel Gibson, Sly Stallone and Jon Voight and Mr. Voight, it now appears that the president was proposed the day before his announcement.

Could it be that the president's ears prick up at the word “tariffs”, but that he only had a blurred understanding for the other Midnight Cowboy?

In all events, Mr. Voight now needs to need all his ambassador to impress the president that what endangers the US cinema registrations is the streaming industry, which in turn is reinforced by catastrophic pandemic, and also the strike of the writers and the growing reality of the AI. Not really foreign tax relief. And what about the world is this “tariff” imposed? How will it work? The managing director of the British Film Commission, Adrian Woton, has described Trump's new tariff idea as “clearly worrying”: But with very British understatement, the details asked himself.

Since films are not physical objects such as bacon or scotch whiskey in 2025 – it really does not make sense to imagine “cinema” as “goods”. The film industry is a complex globalized service industry. Do you beat your 100% tariff for cinema cards? (If so, as my colleague Andrew Pulver emphasizes, the films will simply switch to streaming in mass and Trump will be the further destruction of the US film industry.) Do you use your tariffs on Netflix or Amazon or Apple subscription in relation to the multinational origin of streaming content? How about everything in the world is that sensibly evaluated? Perhaps with an absurd high school mathematics equation of the kind of how the White House was last presented. In fact, the film tariff is only a little less confusing than the one that imposed the penguins of the Heard and McDonald Islands in the Antarctic. But this is more insidious because it sounds as if someone could actually try to put him into practice.

Because the entire political point of this recent trolling step is that nobody knows how it is imposed, certainly not the president. The point – as it now has to be very clear – is not to help the American film industry for which the president has no value. It is to stroke the liberal media and the bleeding heart and the centrist makers. There will be a break while everyone is trying to find out what this means, and maybe this means a kind of imposing streamer subscriptions or tickets, ie a price display for American consumers, like all tariffs. Or maybe Trump will “pause” or change it or forget it while going over to something else with which the zone can be flooded, such a publication of images that is disguised as a Pope. In the meantime, however, there will be catastrophic confusion and discomfort, production plans will be stalled and hindered, while the studios find out in which new costs you have to take into account.

Will these tariffs actually happen? Even if not, long after Trump has lost interest and passed to something else, the mere threat will have damaged the industry that it should.