Star Wars: Starfighter is filming in Britain, soundstages in Hungary are packed and post-production houses in Australia are humming, as the global film industry keeps rolling despite US President Donald Trump’s renewed threats to impose tariffs on movies made outside of the US.
Trump has proposed levying a 100 per cent tariff on films produced overseas to stem the loss of film jobs to production hubs around the world, reviving an idea he first broached in May.
The initial call for tariffs jolted the film world, and temporarily halted projects and international movie finance deals as producers evaluated the potential impact of the levy on each project’s financial viability, two sources familiar with Hollywood motion-picture financing told Reuters.
This time around, the reaction has been more muted.
“Other than the initial flurry of ‘Oh, he’s said it again,’ people are not taking it as seriously as they did the first time around,” said Lee Stone, a partner at London law firm Lee & Thompson, who worked on the Emmy-winning Netflix show Adolescence.
Trump initially called for a 100pc tariff on movies produced outside the country in early May, to stave off the “very fast death” of the American film industry as incentives lured filmmakers to production hubs around the world. The announcement – just weeks before the Cannes Film Festival – caused a panic.
“It was terrible timing. Everyone was saying, ‘What’s going to happen?’” said Stone, noting that Trump’s threat resulted in temporary paralysis. “I’m not getting the impression that there’s the same pause this time.”
Newly released data from industry researcher ProdPro reveals that while overall spending is down 15pc from last year, amid a pullback in scripted television series and big-budget feature films, there is no evidence that Hollywood is abandoning global production hubs.
“We’re not seeing anything in the data that suggests studios are opting to film more of their production in the US because of concern about the tariffs,” said ProdPro CEO Alexander LoVerde.
The US remains the industry’s largest production hub, accounting for $16.6 billion in spending over the last 12 months, according to ProdPro. However, Hollywood studios and streaming services spent even more – $24.3bn – on film and television projects produced outside the US over that same period, ProdPro reported, as they took advantage of tax credits, lower labour costs and world-class soundstages.
The UK has become a major beneficiary of the Hollywood exodus, attracting $8.7bn in film and scripted TV spending over the past year, including major film productions like Star Wars: Starfighter, the much-buzzed-about next entry in the ‘Star Wars’ saga set for release in May 2027.
Canada comes in a close second with $6.4bn, according to ProdPro’s most recent report on production trends.
Other regions – Australia, Ireland, Hungary and Spain – together accounted for nearly one-quarter of all production.
The Covid-19 pandemic and the Hollywood strikes by US writers and actors supercharged the exodus that began years earlier.
“Australia became a bit of a production bubble where particularly in Queensland, productions could continue even as the rest of the world shut down,” said University of Melbourne film expert Kirsten Stevens.
Prague increased its tax breaks from 20pc to 25pc in January, while Britain offers relief of 25.5pc on qualifying films and TV productions, with a higher rate for animated films and a new credit for smaller independent films.
In places like Central Europe, a deep filmmaking tradition and lower labour costs have attracted a long list of Hollywood films including the Russo brothers’ The Gray Man, Netflix’s Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front in the Czech Republic, and Warner Bros Studios’ Dune: Part Three, which began shooting this summer in Hungary.
“Hungarian soundstages are currently operating at full capacity with both international and domestic productions,” Csaba Kael, government commissioner for the development of the Hungarian Motion Picture Industry, told Reuters.
Any change in US trade policy would take time to implement, Kael said.
Hollywood studios have found that distributing work across multiple locations can accelerate the production timetable, allowing films to be completed faster and cheaper.
“It’s not uncommon at high-end films that a bunch of work would come to Australia, but a bunch of work also might go to New Zealand and to London and to somewhere else,” said Mike Seymour, Emmy-nominated visual effects specialist and lecturer at the University of Sydney.
“Sometimes the film is being worked on literally 24 hours a day because of all the time zones,” he said.
For the moment, it is business as usual for filmmakers, said Stephen Weizenecker, an entertainment lawyer with Barnes & Thornburg in Atlanta.
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