President Donald Trump on Sunday said he would authorize the Commerce Department to begin the process of imposed a 100% tariffs on “any and all movies” coming into the country that are produced outside the U.S. “The movie industry in America is DYING [sic]” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, and accused other countries of a “concerted effort” to lure filmmakers and studios away from the U.S. and subjecting viewers to “messaging and propaganda.”

The announcement caused shares of Netflix, Disney, and other media companies to tumble in early trading Monday morning and sent industry executives scrambling to figure out what the tariffs would mean and how they would be applied. By midday Monday, however, the White House appeared to partially walk back the announcement.

“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made, the Administration is exploring all options to deliver on President Trump’s directive to safeguard our country’s national and economic security while Making Hollywood Great Again,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.

The U.S. movie and television industry is still reeling from the two-year Covid shutdown and the prolonged actors and writers strikes of 2023, which together fueled fundamental shifts in consumer behavior. Movie theaters are yet to recover from the disruptions as viewers embraced streaming, and below-the-line workers have suffered as the streaming-fueled “peak TV” production boom of 2019-2022 gave way to studio retrenchment in the face of steep financial losses.

So far in 2025 film and TV production in Hollywood is down 22% from 2024, which also saw a significant decline from the prior year, according to FilmLA.  Many countries have worked to attract production through a combination of tax breaks and other incentives, and U.S. studios have been eager to embrace the lower production costs by moving production abroad.

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How Trump’s proposed tariffs would affect those trends, however, is not clear. The announcement did not indicate whether the 100% figure would be calculated based on a film’s entire production budget or some other metric, or whether the above-the-line budget (i.e. actors, writers, directors, and other opening-credits personnel) would be excluded.

Nor was it clear whether a film’s country of origin would be determined by where principal photography occurred, how and by whom a film was financed, where the company distributing the film was based, or some other factor. Many recent “Hollywood” blockbusters, were filmed largely or entirely overseas. The three “Lord of the Rings” films, for instance, were shot and produced entirely in New Zealand. Many U.S. films and TV series conduction location work in Canada, even if other production elements are performed in the U.S. Also unclear was whether the tariffs would apply to both film and television production or just film, and whether foreign-language films and TV series that would not have been produced in the U.S. in any case would be affected.

If some version of the tariffs does go into effect, however, it would open a new front in the ongoing trade war. So far, Trump’s tariffs have been imposed only on physical goods coming into the U.S. But the film and television industry is long-past the days of shipping cans of physical film around. Nearly all movement of film elements, including completed works, is performed electronically today, leaving it unclear how the import duties would be collected or by whom. Requiring infrastructure providers whose facilities are used to conduct those transfers to measure and report that activity, or collect the levies themselves, would impose a significant new administrative burden on entities not directly involved in or responsible for the affected goods.

China recently imposed some modest new restrictions on Hollywood films coming into the country in response to U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods. But any broader retaliatory tariffs on U.S. film companies could be devasting to the industry the administration says it wants to protect, as more than half of box office receipts these days come from outside the U.S.

“The BFI is working closely with the UK government, and industry partners in the UK and U.S. while we understand the detail of the proposal.,” the British Film Institute said in a statement. “We want to keep collaboration at the heart of our sectors, so we remain a constructive partner to our friends in the US and internationally.”