Cannes Dealmakers Are Already Sick of Talking About Trump's Tariffs

Yahoo

19-05-2025

At Cannes last year, Jon Voight's weapon of choice was the crossbow phallus.
In a scene in Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis (a Cannes competition title last year), Voight, playing the deranged capitalist Hamilton Crassus III, pulls back a bed sheet to reveal it conceals not his grotesquely exaggerated manhood, as his wife Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza) had expected, but a device even more dangerous and deadly.
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Executives heading to Cannes this year are feeling a lot like Plaza. They are tempted to mock Voight, with his Trump-backed plan to Make Hollywood Great Again, while still fearing the damage the 'special ambassador' could do to the international film industry.
Voight's plan, a confusing stick-and-carrot combination of taxes and tariffs on 'foreign-made films' and new but vague promises of domestic production incentives, has rattled the film world. It will be the talk of the Croisette.
'At all the panels, all the cocktail parties, all the dinners, people are just going to keep bringing it up: 'What have you heard? What do you know? What do you think?' It's going to get tiring,' says Simon Williams, a film financier with London-based group Ashland Hill Media Finance. 'By the end of Cannes, we're all going to be sick of talking about it.'
In perhaps a preview of what's to come, at a May 8 press event for Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, a journalist tried to ask about the Trump/Voight plan. Tom Cruise quickly shut them down, requesting 'questions about the movie' instead. The film, which will have its world premiere in Cannes on Wednesday, was shot all over the world, taking advantage of just the kind of foreign production incentives Trump and Voigt have in their sights.
'We're going to have Tom Cruise on the red carpet in Cannes and all anyone will want to talk about is Trump and tariffs,' quipped one U.S. production exec who is not involved with M:I 8. 'Trump has succeeded, once again, in making it all about him.'
Wes Anderson's The Phoenician Scheme, a Focus Features production which shot mainly on German soundstages in Studio Babelsberg, could face similar tariff scrutiny when it premieres in Cannes next week. But there are only a handful of major American movies at the festival this year and the others were either shot in the U.S. — Spike Lee's Highest 2 Lowest in Brooklyn, Ari Aster's Eddington in New Mexico — or were set up as international productions from the get-go, as with Richard Linklater's Nouvelle Vague, a French-language movie set, and shot, entirely in Paris.
Few expect the Trump/Voight plan to disrupt the production schedules of the major studios, at least in the short term. The proposals, from a 120 percent tariff on foreign incentives to new U.S. tax breaks for films that meet an ill-defined 'American cultural test,' are still just suggestions, not legislation. Until it's clear if, when and how the plan will become law, the studios will carry on as usual.
'The studios have slates to fill so they're moving forward, with no major reshoring of any projects that we've been talking about,' says Nicholas Simon of Indochina Productions, a leading production service firm in Southeast Asia, whose credits include HBO's The White Lotus and The Sympathizer.
The immediate impact of the Trump/Voight plan will be felt most strongly in the independent sector, among the hundreds of producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers heading to the Cannes film market. On the surface, Cannes' Marché du Film looks ready for a banner year, with record attendance figures — 2025's market is expected to match or beat last year's record of 15,000 accredited execs — and a lineup of projects and packages as good, or better, than any Marché of the past decade.
'I've seen packages announced for this market the likes of which I've never seen before, with A-listers that never went to the independent world,' says Pia Patatian, president of production and sales group Cloud9 Studios, whose Cannes slate includes Barry Levinson's thriller Assassination, starring Jessica Chastain, Brendan Fraser, Al Pacino and Bryan Cranston, and the Toni Collette/Andy Garcia romantic comedy Under the Stars. This year's Cannes market features new projects with Scarlett Johansson, Sydney Sweeney, John Cena, Gal Gadot and Penélope Cruz, among many, many others.
'That these talents are now in the independent section means something, it means we're actually in a very good moment,' says Patatian. 'Even if there are issues.'
The main issue is uncertainty. The Cannes market runs on trust. Distributors pre-buying rights for film packages have to trust that producers can deliver their film on time and on budget. Producers have to trust in their financing plan, including international subsidies or tax incentives. Sellers have to trust that the minimum guarantees, or MGs, the upfront payments a buyer pledges for the rights to distribute a film, are on the level. Buyers doing negative pickups, taking a finished film for a set fee, have to trust they can recoup.
But the Trump/Voight plan means no one can trust anything anymore. Buyers can't trust producers will be able to deliver on their budgets because producers won't know if they have to add a line to their spreadsheet that reads 'U.S. tariffs.'
'If I shoot a film in the U.K. and get 1 million pounds from the tax credit, will there be a 120 percent tariff on that, so selling it to the U.S. would cost an additional 1.2 million?' asks Williams. 'Everything is in the details, and, so far, with the tariffs, there are no details, no clarity, only speculation.'
'North America is still the cornerstone territory for most indie financing, but what happens when the cornerstone starts to wobble?' asks Simon. 'Those independently financed projects — the Cannes-financed, negative pickups, the foreign presale models — those are in a more precarious place. Cannes is going to tell us a lot. Are people going to stop trusting U.S. MGs? I'm concerned over what the situation might do to bank and investor confidence.'
Most of the art house and non-English-language projects in Cannes — a good chunk of the market — have little to worry about. Bollywood action movies, German rom-coms and social realist dramas from the Dardenne brothers don't rely on U.S. domestic audiences to make bank. It's a different story for English-language movies, from awards season dramas — think of the Hungary-shot The Brutalist — to genre fare of the Jason Statham/Gerard Butler/Liam Neeson variety. The business plan of those features often involves an international shoot, with tax breaks and other soft money incentives to make the numbers work, and upside revenues dependent on a U.S. sale.
'Those movies don't depend on the U.S. to get financed, so you can still get them made, but without the U.S. there's no upside,' says Dirk Schweizer, head of the German division of pan-European production and distribution group Vuelta. 'That can make these projects unattractive for financiers.'
Already, there are signs producers are looking to reassure buyers their projects will go ahead, tariffs or not. The script for Getting Rid of Matthew, a hot rom-com title, from Love Hard director Hernán Jiménez, set to star Emma Roberts, Luke Wilson and Heather Graham, was sent out to Cannes buyers by sales outfit Architect with the words 'to film in the U.S.' printed prominently on its title page. Financiers are running the numbers, weighing whether to pause productions or forge ahead with the added risk.
'Films that we are shooting now, or films that have been shot, we're not going to stop doing them, because putting films on pause brings with it a ton of difficulty. You've spent money on legal closing, you can lose cast. It can cause more damage than not,' says Williams. 'But for projects where we're in early stages, it might make more sense to wait this out. Hopefully, by mid-June we'll have a better idea if there will be tariffs and what exactly that will mean.'
But, come Trump or come tariffs, Cannes will still be Cannes. The independent film industry survived the COVID shutdown, the dual Hollywood strike and the seismic disruption of the streaming revolution. Whatever Voight whips out next, buyers will still need movies and there will still be sellers around to provide them. And anyway, those hotel suites, cocktail receptions and beach fêtes are pre-paid and nonrefundable, so we might as well kick back and enjoy the party.
Patrick Brzeski and Mia Galuppo contributed to this report.
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