Trump's Kneejerk Hollywood Fix Is No Tariff-ic Idea: Bill Mechanic Examines The Pitfalls & Tells How The Town Really Feels

Yahoo

06-05-2025

Editor's note: Bill Mechanic is chairman and CEO of Pandemonium Films and a former top executive at Paramount and Disney and chairman and CEO of Fox Filmed Entertainment. He also is a former producer of the Oscars and Oscar-nominated films like Hacksaw Ridge and Coraline. He also is a teller of hard truths to whom Deadline turns when nobody else will speak up on a hot-button issue. That certainly is the case right now, a day after President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social how he plans to 'fix' runaway production by imposing tariffs on films and TV shows that film outside the U.S. The common refrain today has been that a film business finally on its firmest footing since Covid doesn't need a force to destabilize the hard-won forward momentum. Mechanic takes it a step further, questioning Trump's motives behind a power play that puts Hollywood on its heels, a feeling familiar to many other industries and segments of the economy struggling in this tariff moment.
As anyone who refuses to log onto Truth Social knows, the site has changed the old newspaper slogan 'All the news that's fit to print' into 'All the lies fit to put online.'
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There is no truth on Truth.
So what to make of Agent Orange, the King of Chaos, proclaiming he is going to save Hollywood? Last night he wrote: 'The movie industry is DYING a very fast death' and that he would help save America, on the grounds that shooting films overseas is a 'threat to national security.' Throwing those two big ideas together doesn't change that he has no intention of helping the film industry. All he wants is another dumpster fire in order to obfuscate the blowback his tariffs have caused havoc for American industry, the American economy and, oh yes, problems for everyone pretty much everywhere in the world. So what does he propose to help Hollywood? More tariffs.
What Trump was really saying, to paraphrase Mark Antony, is: 'I come to bury Hollywood, not save it.'
What he's after is more chaos (as if there isn't enough). Everything's backfiring and his unpopularity has reached a historic level. So he goes back to the tried-and-true lie — he's 'fixing' something broken.
That, of course, is absurd. He's exacerbating the economic issues in the content-creation business, which covers both movies and all the various forms of television. There is nothing in his idea that will help the industry.
Let's take it piece by piece (I may be missing a piece or two, but when attacked broadside, strike back in the same manner).
Start with the notion that national security is threatened. Maybe he's doing that, but there isn't a kernel of the truth in the concept that shooting overseas can lead to embedding code or revealing war plans (for those, all you have to do is log into his Cabinet's chat groups). This isn't Fight Club, where porn can be inserted in between frames (especially considering that now, virtually everything is shot on video).
I've produced or overseen hundreds of movies that were shot overseas, even built studios in Australia and Mexico for that purpose. 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 never asked for any changes, and never proposed a single idea. Shooting overseas used to happen mainly because it presented a more appropriate location, or because there were cost savings. More and more in the last decade-plus, money forces the decision, not location.
I would guess lawsuits against any official decree will argue this point. Trump is butting into another area where he has no jurisdiction. I'm not a lawyer by any stretch of the imagination, but if national security is the foundation of the decree, it's a losing proposition. He's made up a solution for a problem that doesn't exist.
Trump was, is and always will be an outsider in Hollywood. Like so many other harebrained ideas coming out of Washington these days, this one seems spewed out rather than thought through, and it presents a solution that doesn't solve anything but aims to create headlines and noise as opposed to making things better. It is all part of Trump's revenge tour. He's out to destroy anyone or anything that has not bowed at his altar. Voters, law firms, educational institutions, for God's sakes — our allies! He's the guy lighting the fire to burn down Hollywood, not the one putting it out.
Production has left California due to economic issues, but it has not left the U.S. Try booking a stage in Georgia or Louisiana. Those states have trained crews and valuable subsidies. There are many other states also attracting production with incentives but aren't as advanced.
Much like Detroit lost its hold on the auto industry, California has lost its dominance, mostly due to the arrogance of not understanding there are always alternatives. More than 20 years ago, the film commission came to see me when I ran Fox to find out what could be done. I told them the labor costs were higher and the incentives at that time didn't exist at all. No-brainer to shoot elsewhere.
Nothing was done until the problem grew to disaster levels. There are current bills before the California Legislature that, if passed, would be a godsend and reverse a lot of the production decisions based on money. If Trump really cared, he'd create a federal program of incentives (much like the one in Australia). What are the chances of that happening? Zero. He's too busy slashing and burning everything in his path that doesn't throw him money.
Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico and even New York aren't losing projects over subsidies. California is — but California is part of the revenge tour, not a place he'd even think to play a round of golf.
So what kind of potential harm will Trump's proposed fix create?
Virtually no independent movie can be made without subsidies. Yes, if I can shoot in Australia and pick up 15% over one of our subsidy states, I would. I have. Because I'm not patriotic? Hardly. Then why?
Because the current movie business is such a mess – the studios and streamers have damaged theatrical, eliminating the biggest part of sequential distribution and severely wounding international. Meaning every single bit of cost savings counts.
Enough to be the difference between making a movie or scrapping it. If I produced Hacksaw Ridge 30 years ago, I would have had a much bigger budget and would not have shot the Okinawa section in Australia, and certainly would have shot the American section in the South. But to make the movie, I had to slice the budge by 30%, needing to shoot everything in Australia, where we were fortunately blessed by the world's best subsidies, and then raised the rest of the budget through equity and presales. Otherwise, the Oscar-nominated film wouldn't have been made.
Under Trump's decree, Hacksaw Ridge would die before it had a chance to live. A film about American courage, an American humanitarian — an America we all believe in or want to believe in and one that bore no foreign influence but was proudly shot entirely in New South Wales.
Independent production requires subsidies, not tariff wars. How many industries are being destroyed by tariffs? Small production companies and independent producers might become a thing of the past.
The studios and streamers will survive the decree, but my guess is it will cut production because of higher costs. Disney, WB, Uni, and Sony will only make the surest bets (not that they aren't already), meaning the edges of production will be narrowed, and there is barely anything there now. Netflix and the streamers, whose growth now comes mainly from overseas, will have to adjust. It certainly is worse for them as they have allocated a good portion of their budgets to international production in order to have enough local product.
Trump said he proposed his film tariffs after deep discussion with a couple of people. My guess is he was referencing talking to himself in the mirror, or to a vision of himself in some other wacky manner. This is an idea that has no thought behind it. It helps no one. It doesn't make America stronger. It only makes us a more hated country.
Let's hope it dies a natural death, and that someone in the industry shows the courage to challenge the decree in court. The rest of us are just collateral damage in his revenge tour, where there is no such thing as collateral damage. There is only revenge. Like Mr. Magoo, he never notices the dead bodies left in the road.
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