After Trump vows tariffs on foreign movies, the Canadian film industry says he’s lost the plot

U.S. President Donald Trump says he wants to impose a 100 per cent tariff on movies produced outside the country, a move that could devastate the Canadian film landscape — but experts are scratching their heads over how such a tax would work, given how intertwined the global film industry is.

Trump, in a Truth Social post on Sunday night, said he directed the Department of Commerce and the U.S. Trade Representative to “immediately begin the process” of imposing the tariff. He hasn’t signed an executive order, and the White House said on Monday that no final decisions had been made.

Other countries “are offering all sorts of incentives to draw out filmmakers and studios away from the United States,” Trump wrote. 

“Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated,” he went on, framing it as a matter of national security.

Asked if he’d float the issue during his meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday, Trump responded that Canada is “only one of many countries” that uses tax incentives to lure U.S. film productions. 

He offered few details on what this latest plank in his tariff regime would entail, or how it would be executed — including whether it would impact co-productions, or films made entirely abroad and exhibited in the U.S., not to mention those that appear on streaming services and at film festivals.

Greg Denny, a Canadian film producer whose most recent credits include The Apprentice, a biopic about Trump that was partially shot in Toronto, says movies are rarely the product of a single country.

“We’re not creating a good here. We’re creating a movie. How do you put a tariff on top of that?” he asked. “This is many countries working together at all times, creating footage and content… It’s not really something I see you can put a tariff on.”

The announcement also drew swift rebukes from the Canadian Media Producers Association (CMPA) and the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA), the actors’ union. 

B.C. Premier David Eby called the proposal “incredibly hard to understand,” while Ontario’s Doug Ford lamented that it’s “something new with [Trump]” every day.

Why Hollywood goes north

Like other parts of its economy, Canada’s film industry is deeply intertwined with that of its southern neighbour. Oscar-winners like Titanic, The Revenant and Juno were all filmed at least partly on Canadian soil; and Hollywood filmmakers from Guillermo Del Toro to Christopher Nolan have shot multiple movies here.

That means Canada is also vulnerable to crises that originate in Hollywood, like the 2023 Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which further wounded an industry still recovering from pandemic-related shutdowns.

Canada is highly appealing to U.S. film producers, according to experts. The filmmaking workforce is highly skilled, but costs less to pay, and Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary and Halifax are frequently used as stand-ins for other cities in the U.S., Europe and Asia. U.S. film production creates 30,000 jobs and has a $2.6 billion economic impact in Toronto alone, according to Mayor Olivia Chow. 

Most importantly, the federal government offers a 16 per cent refundable tax credit, which is used to attract foreign productions from Hollywood and elsewhere to Canada. 

Provinces also have their own tax incentives, some of which — like Ontario’s — can be harmonized with the federal credit. B.C., meanwhile, announced just a few months ago that it would up its production tax incentives, and give a $2 billion bonus to productions that spend big in the province.

CBC News reached out to several major U.S. studios for their reaction, but none have responded. Trump said on Monday that he’d meet with the industry to discuss the proposal. 

“I’m not looking to hurt the industry. I want to help,” he said. “I want to make sure they’re happy with it because we’re all about jobs.”

‘The consumer still wants to consume’

Charlie Keil, professor at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute, says a U.S. film industry exodus from Canada would have a “devastating impact” on the domestic sector.

But it’s hard to know how a tariff like the one Trump is proposing would be imposed, and to which movies it would apply.

“There’s a whole spectrum here, between films that are primarily made in the U.S. but might have some post-production work done in another country, to films that are entirely made by another country,” he said.

There’s also the question of who would absorb the cost of the tariff. After years of price hikes and hidden junk fees, a more expensive movie ticket likely wouldn’t fly with audiences, says Keil.

That would mean theatre owners would eat the cost themselves or split it with a distributor, which would make production itself more expensive. Retaliatory tariffs would further complicate things, given that the global box office is deeply important to the success of a blockbuster, Keil notes.

And what about U.S. streaming services? Netflix, for example, has seen success with foreign-made content — being the primary distributor for Oscar fare like Spain’s Society of the Snow and South Korea’s Okja.

Noah Segal, the co-president of the Toronto-based film distributor Elevation Pictures, says major streamers are unlikely to get on board with Trump’s proposal.

“I think that they want to get localized content going because they know there’s certain [niches] that they can’t get through American content,” he said.

However, if a U.S. tariff is imposed globally on other filmmaking countries, Segal argues that it could be a boon for Canada’s domestic industry.

“If there’s less content, the consumer still wants to consume as much as the consumer wants to consume. So therefore, it may be a great opportunity for Canadian content, Canadian culture and Canadian industry,” he said.