• procrastitron@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Demonstrating once again that he has no idea how tariffs work.

    Tariffs are taxes on the importation of physical goods and they’re charged at the port of entry.

    Movies aren’t physical goods and they don’t go through a port of entry.

    There’s literally no way to put tariffs on foreign movies but Trump is too stupid to understand that.

    The closest thing they could do is charge tariffs on DVDs, and that would have zero impact on anything.

    • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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      3 months ago

      Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.

      I do not know how it works, but he wants American movies that filmed outside US to get tariffs.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        3 months ago

        Hey, that makes two of you. He clearly doesn’t know how any of this works, either.

        But yeah, it also drives me nuts that people can have entire threads of posts without having clicked through to the thing they are reacting to once.

        You may even draw some connections between that and Trump getting elected in the first place, if you wanted to put yourself in a very deep pit of despair. I mean, this whole thing is in reaction to a dumb tweet. Even Trump doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about or how any of this would work.

        But he said it, and now we’re talking about it without any understanding on what it is, because it’s just some crap he posted in the crapper. And tomorrow he will see what people are tweeting back and double down on whatever gets him the most attention.

        I am SO tired of this century.

        If you want to do something useful go get Romanians on the platforms to get their friends off their asses and not electing a Trumpian president. That may at least still do something.

        • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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          3 months ago

          The only way i see it applied, is only to US companies that they film outside US. So the state comes and asks how much did you spend filming there? $5 million, well here is a $5 million bill to pay us.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
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            3 months ago

            Yeah, but now you’re implementing it for him.

            Filming on location is a bit of an afterthought, and typically local film comissions will spend money creating incentives for it when they have the right conditions for it. You know, weather, facilities, locations, some beaches or mountains you can pretend are a fantasy thing with dragons…

            But the movie is not necessarily produced there, and there is no real process for the government of the place where the production firm originates to go add a tax disincentive on their end. I mean, at what stage? Using what instrument? Production companies for movies are often made ad-hoc for an individual project anyway.

            He’s just taking out of his ass, as always, and we’re giving him too much attention, as always. If he gets to doubling down on this he may try to do something, and he probably should figure out himself what that is. I’m not gonna do his homework for him.

            • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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              3 months ago

              He’s just taking out of his ass, yes, but he has others to figure the how and the terms for him. Or he can do the method he used, putting tariffs all over the world. Asking chatGPT lmao

              • MudMan@fedia.io
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                3 months ago

                For sure, but at least on that they were just being dumb about figuring out an amount to slot into a tax process that was already in place.

                I don’t know that they have a mechanism or instrument to tax any of this at any point. And I’d love to see them have Grok or ChatGPT or whatever design a loophole-free tax that targets some company of unknown origin shooting some footage in some location through some service provider or subsidiary and then post-producing that footage somewhere else and then showing that footage in cinemas, TV and streaming in some other location.

    • zurohki@aussie.zone
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      3 months ago

      Sounds like it’s even stupider than that - he wants to tariff movies sold in the US by US companies which were filmed overseas. So it not only doesn’t go through a port, the finished movie doesn’t cross borders at all.

      Hollywood accounting is very experienced at making money disappear when taxes are due, I can’t imagine tariffs would pose any problem at all. Anything that crosses the border will be worth $0 and make a loss, they’ll have the paperwork to prove it.

      I might be completely wrong about what Trump meant here. Which is fair, really - he likely doesn’t know what he meant either.

  • Hobbes_Dent@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    From the country that had a black Captain America, an anti-fascist superhero, in theatres while it wouldn’t vote for a woman who is black.

    Who fed us all those movies about fighting for freedom and didn’t even get the plot of their own movies let alone a history* documentary.

    lol.

    *

      • dontbelasagne@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Hollywood has been propandada since it was created. It was literally invented so they could influence other countries and they’ve been doing that since the 80’s through merchandise. It’s not art for art’s sake. Hollywood has always been commercials for merchandise.

      • wwb4itcgas@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        It’ll be terrible, just terrible. What will I do without the next Marvel cookie-cutter project, Disney-fied Star Wars movie or the no doubt upcoming Borderlands sequel?

    • KumaSudosa@feddit.dk
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      3 months ago

      I guess they’ll also stop disneyfying European folklore then… can’t wait for a Little Mermaid movie with HC Andersen’s actual plot!

    • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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      3 months ago

      From the article:

      Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.

  • bstix@feddit.dk
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    3 months ago

    Sweden does the opposite.

    The reason why there’s always a Swedish actor in Nordic films is that the Swedish Film Institute gives funding to movies with Swedish actors.

    It’s such a silly trope by now, but at least it’s the sane and successful way of doing it.

    Adding a “tariff” will only result in more CGI slob. What if someone makes a movie with a story happening in Italy entirely by CGI? Would it be tariffed, and if so, what if the Italy location is actually in a galaxy far far away?

      • bstix@feddit.dk
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        3 months ago

        Yeah they do.

        So does Hollywood.

        Minecraft would have been better with a no-name actor as Steve. It would still suck, but at least it wouldn’t also be a Jack Black movie.

        Don’t get me wrong, I like Jack Black; He plays an excellent role as Jack Black in movies where Jack Black does Jack Black things like the famous Jack Black falsetto, which is funny.

        He’s no Steve, though. Steve is an anonymous character and very much not a famous celebrity. Any random person off the street would have been a better cast.

    • KumaSudosa@feddit.dk
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      3 months ago

      As a Dane in Sweden mostly watching European productions this is always so hilarious to me. It’s pretty cool though, we should be exposed to each other more!

      Nordisk Film does the same so there’ll be a token Danish actor in Swedish productions too, like in Helikopterrånet.

    • modeler@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Adding a “tariff” will only result in more CGI slob

      It may be slob, but it will be American Slob

  • darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    3 months ago

    American audiences watching too many non-American movies — now that’s something I really didn’t have on my 2025 bingo card!

    • Leon@pawb.social
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      3 months ago

      It reeks of information control. They can control the American narrative using films etc. as propaganda but if people have access to foreign media that will pollute the messaging.

      It’s the same tactics that North Korea employs.

    • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      I imagine this will only have a large impact on the Anglosphere. Indian movies industries, including Bollywood, rarely make movies in English.

      This is actually an example of how a tariff can backfire immensely. The world consumes more US content than the US consumers do global content. Retaliatory tariffs from other countries could significantly diminish Hollywood’s global reach.

  • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Man, I have such mixed feelings on this.

    On one hand, it would mean that Netflix would stop trying to push shitty Bollywood films on me (seriously, if I could prevent all Hindi films from showing up on my Netflix forever, I would absolutely do that). On the other hand it would mean that the really darkly melancholic Euro films would also be off the menu.

    • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      A lot of the good South Asian content is in the form of TV shows now. Movies (especially North Indian / Hindi) have been on the downslide for the past 10 years… I feel like shows are generally doing better than movies globally. It’s really hard to explore a topic well in ~2 hours.

      Generally if you stop watching movies from a region it will stop suggesting them to you. I watched an Italian movie once and it recommended movies from there for a week or so and then stopped.

      • HelixDab2@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        I have NEVER watched a Hindi movie. The closest I got was the most recent Zatoichi film, which had a weird-ass song-and-dance number at the end that was totally unrelated to the entire film. But scrolling through Netflix, it still keeps suggesting Hindi films for me, “because you liked…!”

        I do watch some K-horror (Train to Busan, The Wailing, Thirst, etc.), Japanese chambara (the above mentioned Zatoichi, Lone Wolf and Cub, Hanzo the Razor–which is solidly pinku-eiga–and others), and sometimes Chinese historical pieces. I’ve watched a few Malay and Indonesian horror films as well. Some of the Asian television series are pretty great; I was really enjoying Gyeongseong Creature and Kingdom. I’ve tried watching Japanese TV, and the stuff I’ve seen has just been bad. I don’t think I’ve come across any Chinese TV shows that have interested me.

        • shawn1122@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Yeah with South Asian movies you have to be pretty selective. A ton of movies are produced there and they generally are not directed at a global audience (which is perfectly fine in my opinion).

          I’m not sure what this Zatoichi film is. Generally song and dance numbers are in commercialized mass market trash these days but had their charm (to south asian audiences at least) in the 90s and early 2000s. Those mass market movies are usually the ones that end up on Netflix.

          There are some excellent hindi movies out there but more recently I’d say south Indian movies have been better overall.

  • Rose56@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    That’s bad for the film industry! I have a friend working on film industry here in Canada, and productions are dead, not much left since trade war started!