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Investing.com-- U.S. President Donald Trump on Sunday evening said he had instructed his administration to impose a 100% tariff on all foreign-produced movies in the U.S., claiming that the American movie industry was “dying.”
Trump claimed that there was concentrated effort by foreign nations to draw filmmakers and studios away from the U.S., and that it was a national security threat, along with a vehicle for messaging and propaganda.
“I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands,” Trump said in a post on Truth.Social.
It was not immediately clear how Trump’s tariff would be implemented, given that movies are distributed through cinemas, cable television, streaming services, and to a lesser extent, sales of physical media.
The U.S. movie industry has been undergoing a major paradigm shift in the last decade, especially with the advent of streaming services and as cinema volumes struggled to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The gross domestic yearly box office in the U.S. was about $8.57 billion in 2024, data from Box Office Mojo showed, down 3.8% from a year earlier. The print was also well below highs seen prior to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, which marked a major tipping point for cinemas.
The top four highest-grossing movies of all time are produced by American studios, with the most recent high-grossing project being director James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water in 2022.Cameron has directed three of the four highest-grossing movies, which were produced by studios such as Paramount and 20th Century Fox. The top non-Cameron project with a sizeable gross is Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame in 2019, produced by Disney (NYSE:DIS).
The highest grossing movie made outside the U.S. is China’s Ne Zha 2 in 2025.