Why tariffs on foreign films won’t Make America Great Again

How on earth do you tariff a film? Who pays, the moviegoer? And when do they pay – when they purchase a ticket in a US cinema, or when they stream it at home on their iPad in, say, Italy or Brazil?

There’s a very good reason why tariffs are normally applied to relatively straightforward physical goods – a car, a tonne of wheat, so many barrels of oil, bottles of scotch and so on. But a film?

That’s just one reason why Donald Trump’s latest initiative – this time, to place a 100 per cent tariff on “foreign” (ie, non-American) films, to “Make Hollywood Great Again” – is more than usually dangerous and impractical.

As so often, it is rooted in the past, and so much so that it seeks to recreate a bygone, glorious era in a restoration “golden age”, with things as they were roughly when Trump was growing up – chronologically, if not emotionally. Hence, Trump’s trade adviser saying that what they wanted to bring back was American workers putting American engines into Cadillacs in Detroit.

Now it seems he wants modern-day Cary Grants and Audrey Hepburns making movies primarily in southern California; if it’s supposed to be set in Belle Époque Paris or the Congo they can damn well build a set. There’s a reason why the president picked Jon Voight, Mel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone to be his “special envoys” to Hollywood – they are all, like Trump himself, action men best suited to a bygone age.

After all, Trump’s closest link to Hollywood is his appearance in the 1992 classic Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, where he played himself, naturally (because who else could?). With a Maga majority, the movie may yet make it into the Library of Congress National Film Registry, even though the film’s director, Chris Columbus, fears deportation if he cuts Trump’s scene, which he would quite like to do now.

Trump’s Hollywood policy is an atavism passing as economic policy. But, in fact, a tariff could work.

An American company makes a modest feature film and, say, it costs $10m (£7.4m). Let us assume that $2m is spent on filming and post-production in the UK. So in that case, Trump’s 100 per cent tariff would be $2m; the extra cost would be passed on to consumers – tickets at the cinema, extra fees for streaming and higher rights paid by the TV channels who want to screen it.

If it’s a British, French or Korean film, then the importers – the people who show it in cinemas and sell it online in the US – would pay a tariff of 100 per cent of the import costs, assuming none of it was devised, written, filmed or post-produced in the US, in which case the tariff would be reduced proportionately.

Would it make Hollywood great again? No. Southern California and other American sites would remain high-cost locations, even if they became more competitive with, say, the UK, Australia, India or New Zealand. What would probably happen, and maybe quite quickly, is that some scenes would no longer be conventionally “filmed”, with human beings on sets with props, but rendered using AI – a technology that would revolutionise the production model and radically reduce costs.

Indeed, such a scenario is already feasible, though, like most things AI-related, still in its infancy. Given the rights to a star’s image, we could see “new” movies starring Marilyn Monroe or John Wayne cast against type and in thoroughly modern settings – Monroe as a troubled and charmless social media beauty influencer; Wayne as a trans woman running a people trafficking syndicate in Mexico. That sort of thing.

We may learn to love it; the next generations certainly will. The quality, with a good script and compelling storyline, might be as good as any “proper” film, and would be especially powerful in sci-fi and horror. How about some new Laurel and Hardy routines? Remakes of Chaplin classics, starring new, synthesised stars?

One day, the AI-generated genre will have its own Spielbergs and James Camerons as guiding geniuses, and its own Samuel Goldwyns and the brothers Warner. Some will be Chinese, Indian, South American, Korean, European. The film industry will probably be less dominated by Hollywood.

Such movies would still be tariffed, but they wouldn’t raid as much revenue because the cost base might be far lower, and, in any case, they wouldn’t be created on the traditional movie lots under the old, familiar star system. The narrative movie as we have known it since the early 1900s – with its film grammar and production conventions – might itself evolve into something looser and unrecognisable.

Trump wants to bring back the golden age of Hollywood that he remembers. In reality, he’s on a mission impossible.