While much of the coverage of President Donald Trump’s proposed 100% tariffs on imported films has focused on the theatrical industry, the levies on imported movies would also have a negative, though indirect, impact on TV production.
“While Trump has not commented on the television production business, tariffs on overseas production would have an equally chilling impact on TV production,” Lightshed Partners partner and media and technology analyst Richard Greenfield wrote in a research note.
Concerns over how the proposed tariffs might affect the Hollywood studios, streamers like Netflix and other media companies sent the share prices of Netflix, Paramount Global and Warner Bros. Discovery down in early trading on Monday. Following the negative reaction from financial markets and some Hollywood studio executives, the White House seemed to walk back from the proposal.
“Although no final decisions on foreign film tariffs have been made,” a White House spokesman told The Hollywood Reporter, 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.”
While Trump did not mention TV or streaming services in his Sunday social media post proposing the tariffs, the potential impact of such a move is worth considering. That’s because television is so important to the Hollywood studios.
Even if the proposal is not expanded to TV programming, it would likely cause foreign governments to implement tariffs on U.S. content exports, threatening the multibillion-dollar market for U.S. movies and TV.
In 2023, the U.S. movies racked up $22.6 billion in export revenue, creating a trade surplus of $15.3 billion. U.S. television exports are harder to track, but U.S. shows like “Grey’s Anatomy,“ “NCIS,” “Law & Order,” “The Simpsons“ and many others produce significant international revenue.
A 2013 study by the U.K. group Digital TV Research estimated that U.S. studios generated some $5.4 billion a year in selling drama series to European television, according to THR.
Because the Hollywood studios typically package their TV shows with their blockbuster films, any tariffs imposed on U.S. film exports by foreign governments might hurt revenue for TV shows, which in turn could decrease production.
If the administration expanded the movie tariffs to TV, which employs many more people in production, the levies would have a direct, major impact on the production of bigger-budget, high-profile dramas.
Like movies, a growing number of these big-budget series are at least partly produced outside the U.S. in the U.K., Canada and other locales. Amazon Prime’s “Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” was, for example, produced in New Zealand in its first season and then moved production to the U.K.
Beyond that, high-profile TV productions have for decades relied on international sales. For example, by the early 2000s, first-season U.S. broadcast shows were covering around half of their budgets from international markets in pre-sales and output deals, a practice that has made international programming confabs like MIPCOM extremely important for U.S. studios and producers.
More recently, Netflix, Amazon’s Prime Video and other major streamers have been able to leverage their international footprint of subscribers to fund dramas like "Rings of Power", which reportedly had a record breaking $1 billion budget. That international presence has given these streaming companies a major competitive advantage over domestic U.S. broadcasters.
Even if the tariffs were not applied to TV production, any retaliatory tariffs by foreign countries could include TV programs.
Europe, for example, already has content quotes for European content that limit the amount of U.S. programming that can air on broadcasters in European countries. The retaliatory tariffs could harm sales, hurt co-production agreements with international broadcasters and disrupt the globalized production used on many high-profile dramas that now heavily rely on cloud-based editing and postproduction.
Such problems prompted Lightshed’s Greenfield to write: “Last night’s Truth Social post from President Trump has everyone in Hollywood scratching their heads. Movie production has been migrating overseas for decades, attracted by lower cost labor markets, sound stage availability and most importantly substantial foreign tax credits. If movie production was forced back into the US, the net result would be a dramatic reduction in the number of films made to absorb higher production costs. While Trump has not commented on the television production business, tariffs on overseas production would have an equally chilling impact on TV production.”
The note to investors also stressed that “it’s unclear how a movie tariff system would even work. Movies are often shot in multiple locations, with post-production in a different location. Given the substantial amount of digital enhancement to a film in 2025, if post-production occurs in the U.S., is it a U.S. film or does it only matter if some or all of the film was shot overseas? Would the tariff on movies be applied based on minutes of overseas footage that make it into the final film? Or would a tariff be based on raw minutes filmed, regardless of whether they made it into the ending film? Would studios have to submit their final production cost to the government for tariffs? … [W]ould streaming films be subject to the tariff as well? Would the tariff impact future windows of movie exploitation or only the first window?”
Greenfield concluded, “Nobody knows what the President’s Truth Social post means and we fear, neither does he.”
