Ban this foreign filth! Can cinema really threaten national security?

Business Mayor

09-05-2025

A s always with pronouncements by President Trump, once you had peeled away the xenophobia, removed the stew of resentment, ignored the sheer idiocy and asterisked the possible illegality, there was a small kernel of truth to his posting on Truth Social last Sunday. 'The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,' he wrote, pointing to the nefarious tax breaks other countries gave film-makers as 'a National Security threat' and proposing an 100% tariff on films made oversees. 'It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda! WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA AGAIN!'
How would a 100% tariff on films made oversees work? Just movies shot overseas? What about movies set overseas? And who would pay? How do you impose tariffs on goods without a port of entry? 'Commerce is figuring it out,' said a White House official. In fact, movies are listed as an exception to presidential authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which gives the president authority to address national security threats, so it is likely the lawyers would end up figuring it out, if Trump's plan went ahead. But, many executives in Hollywood are quietly nodding agreement. It is true that Los Angeles has seen feature movie shoot days plummet from 3,901 in 2017 to just 2,403 in 2024, a 38% drop. Many major franchises such as Avatar and Mission: Impossible are shot mostly overseas, where the lure of lucrative tax breaks offset such minor inconveniences as the incursion of some Derbyshire sheep into one of Tom Cruise's paragliding set-pieces.
Clear the sheep and go again … Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Photograph: Credit: Paramount Pictures/Paramount Pictures/Allstar
Whether Ethan Hunt's jaunts around the Lake District represent a legitimate national security threat – as opposed to, say, including sensitive war plans in a group chat – is best left to historians. Trump's vision of Maga cinema is much like his vision of Maga America: an attempt to turn back the clock to the 1950s, when movies were still shot on a Hollywood backlot, cinema attendance was at its peak and the US flooded countries, whose previously quota-restricted film industries had been devastated by war, with American films, as part of the Marshall plan. 'What we are in fact attempting to do in Europe is to create a Marshall plan of ideas,' wrote political journalist Walter Lippmann in The Cold War: A Study in US Foreign Policy (1947). 'We have created a new Athens, a celluloid Athens, in which films and ideas about freedom, democracy, and self-determination are broadcast to all the world.'
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As usual, Trump is playing his victor-as-victim card. We're used to hearing protectionist cries from smaller countries protesting America's cinematic hegemony – not the other way around. 'We will become a cultural colony of the United States if this goes on,' said director René Clair after France signed the Blum-Byrnes agreement in 1946, which cleared some of France's war debt in return for opening up French cinemas to American films. In 1993, when Spielberg's Jurassic Park stormed into 450 cinemas – a quarter of the country's 1,800 total – French culture minister Jacques Toubon declared the movie 'a threat to French national identity' and claimed that it was every Frenchman's 'patriotic duty' to, instead, see Germinal, an adaptation of Émile Zola's novel about the 19th-century coalminers starring Gérard Depardieu. Arriving as the general agreement on tariffs and trade talks got under way, Jurassic Park became a political football with which 'to confront, with renewed muscle, the yankosaurs who menace our country' as Libération put it. 'We cannot allow the Americans to treat us in the way they dealt with the redskins,' director Bertrand Tavernier told the European parliament.
A political football … Joseph Mazzello, Laura Dern and Sam Neill in Jurassic Park. Photograph: Universal/Allstar
Dressing up soft power incursions as hard power threats may, at times, seem irresistible, but there's a wide gulf between 'perceived national security threats' and 'actual national security threats'. Trump's proposal to make American films great again would lump the US together with such isolationist, authoritarian states as China and Iran. When Avatar proved wildly popular to Chinese audiences in 2010, it was pulled early from theatres to make room for a biopic of Confucius, after officials fretted its themes of resistance to imperialism could stoke unrest. In Iran, last month, Maryam Moghaddam and Behtash Sanaeeha, the directors of the gentle romance My Favourite Cake, whose heroine is shown without a headscarf, were sentenced to 14 months in prison on charges of 'spreading lies with the intention of disturbing public opinion'.
The national security apparatus of the state makes for a notoriously poor film critic. When Soviet authorities allowed John Ford's adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) into cinemas on the basis that it showed the suffering of a poor American farming family during the Great Depression, one audience member reportedly remarked: 'They may have been poor, but at least they had a truck.' It's important to remember that, though France attempted to restage the Battle of Little Bighorn over the influx of Hollywood movies in 1946, they lost and the result was the French New Wave, as directors like Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Chabrol played catchup with the sudden glut of American movies, and fashioned their own homegrown counterpoint. 'What switched me to films was the flood of American pictures into Paris after the Liberation,' said Truffaut who, between 1946 and 1956, watched more than 3,000 films by the likes of Welles, Hitchcock and Ford, that had gathered dust during the Nazi occupation.
Movies have always been an international medium and market, and are only getting more so. Jurassic Park may have smushed Germinal at the box office – $1bn to $6m – but 1993 marked another important watershed, as Hollywood's foreign revenue outstripped domestic revenue for the first time in its history. Today, international markets account for more than 70% of Hollywood's box office revenue. Ironically, Hollywood is one of the few places where the US does not see one of Trump's dreaded trade deficits. According to the Motion Picture Association, the industry enjoys a $15.3bn trade surplus, and with that surplus has come an undeniable softening of the amount of American flag-waving we see on screen. A rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner was removed from Toy Story 2. Bohemian Rhapsody had some of its queerness toned down for the Chinese market. Producers of Top Gun: Maverick removed Taiwan's flag from Maverick's bomber jacket, to appease China's censors, but, after one of the film's Chinese backers, Tencent, pulled out, it was put back, at least for the version that showed in Taiwan.
'Mercilessly destroy anyone' … James Franco and Seth Rogen in The Interview. Photograph: Ed Araquel/AP
You can't enjoy cinematic dominance over other countries and brandish insensitivity to their respective cultures. Hence the pusillanimity that overcame Sony Pictures, after Seth Rogen and James Franco's 2014 comedy The Interview, about two bumbling journalists who end up involved in a CIA plot to kill Kim Jong-un, precipitated a threat from the North Korean government to 'mercilessly destroy anyone who dares hurt or attack the supreme leadership of the country even a bit'. After Sony Pictures' computers were hacked, and sensitive emails between its executives dumped online, Sony backed down and withdrew the film from release, while another North Korea-set comedy, Pyongyang, about an American accused of spying in the country, was quietly ditched by its production company, New Regency. The film's star, Steve Carell, tweeted that it was a 'sad day for creative expression'.
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Is this what Trump means by 'messaging and propaganda'? Given his fondness for Kim Jong-un and his dislike of queerness, probably not, but the idea of secret messaging that American films are forced to carry if they shoot overseas would appear to be another of Trump's bogeymen. 'I've produced or overseen hundreds of movies that were shot overseas, even built studios in Australia and Mexico for that purpose,' responded Bill Mechanic, CEO of Pandemonium Films and the executive who oversaw the shoot of James Cameron's Titanic in Mexico and Mel Gibson's Hacksaw Ridge in Australia. 'Other than China, which offered rigid co-production terms, no foreign government has ever even commented on any political content in any of those movies. None has ever asked for any changes, and never proposed a single idea.'
James Cameron's Titanic would have sunk without trace with the proposed tariff. Photograph: 20TH CENTURY FOX/Allstar
Neither Titanic nor Hacksaw Ridge, needless to say, would have survived Trump's proposed tariffs. It's hard to see how so blunt a stick as 100% tariffs would serve to roll back the irreversible forces of globalisation. The way to get production back into the US is incentivise film-makers with tax breaks, not threaten them with tariffs. The most likely effect of tariffs would be to choke what little life remains in the already embattled business of theatrical distribution, annihilate the indie sector, render most low- to mid-budget productions unfinanceable and even dent the big blockbusters such as Mission: Impossible, as studios recalibrate their profit margins. It would result in fewer movies being made in the US, not more.
But it's doubtful whether helping Hollywood was indeed the aim. A believer in free markets, except when he isn't, Trump has already started to walk back his ludicrous proposal, with the White House saying that 'no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made'. Hollywood is not going back to the All-American 1950s anytime soon. The 'celluloid Athens' proclaimed by Walter Lippmann is now more like a celluloid Constantinople – increasingly international, plural, connected. 'The world is listening,' ran the motto of George Lucas's THX Dolby system. Yes, but the world is also speaking now. It's Hollywood's turn to listen.