Foreign films fucked: Another week, another round of tariffs! Yesterday, President Donald Trump said he would be imposing 100 percent tariffs on all foreign films. "WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!" declared Trump, who called foreign films a "national security threat" due to their ability to deliver propaganda to U.S. viewers.
"Other nations have been stealing the…movie-making capability of the United States. I said to a couple of people, 'What do you think?' I have done some very strong research over the last week, and we are making very few movies now," he told reporters over the weekend. "Hollywood is being destroyed. Now you have a grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I am not just blaming other nations, but other nations, a lot of them, have stolen our movie industry. If they are not willing to make a movie inside the United States, and we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They are supporting them financially. So that is sort of a threat to our country in a sense."
Stealing is an odd way of putting it. Did he just learn that other countries make movies too? And, yes, other countries will give special breaks to their film industries, in much the same way U.S. states already do: They vie for business, offering tax credits and other incentives to try to get movie production to their states. (This is why plenty of headlines have heralded Georgia, specifically Atlanta, as "Hollywood of the South.")
