Last month, President Trump renewed his proposal to place a 100% tariff on all foreign-made films. The president said the tariffs are needed because he thinks the U.S. film industry is being “stolen” by foreign countries. 

The proposal is getting mixed reviews at DePaul. Juniper Muellner, a DePaul junior and film student, said she dislikes the president’s strategy.

“It just sounds stupid, and that feels annoying because international movies are always the best,” she said.

 Muellner thinks the tariffs will also hurt independent filmmakers.

“Independent filmmaking is already a dying art,” she said. “The line of what is indie and what isn’t is so blurry now because everything’s so expensive.”

Muellner continued that she thinks the tariffs will only “discourage” filmmakers from making films, which she described as “frustrating.” 

Trump first threatened the tariff in May, hoping to reinvigorate what he describes as a “dying” industry in Hollywood. However, in 2023 the U.S. film industry recorded a $15.3 billion surplus, according to the Motion Picture Association. 

Marc Menet, an adjunct faculty professor at DePaul in DePaul’s School of Cinematic Arts, thinks the tariff proposal leads to more questions than answers.

“It sounds great on paper, but in practice, I don’t know,” he said. “For instance, … one film could be shooting different parts of the movie in different countries and locations, so what percentage has to be filmed in America? Does it all have to be filmed in America?” 

Menet is also skeptical of the reasoning behind the tariffs.

“I’m just worried that this is all theater, that it’s meant to try and outshine or shame the governor of California, rather than actually be a practical solution to a real problem,” he said.

Menet said the issue is deeper than the decline of domestic film production and that independent filmmakers, for instance, have always struggled. 

“The history of indie film has been filled with films that never see the light of day,” he said.

Changes in how films are distributed also have impacted the industry. Before streaming platforms, a main source of income that kept indie filmmaking afloat was physical media through movie rental stores, Menet said. Stores such as Walmart or Blockbuster had to fill their shelves with other movies besides Hollywood blockbusters to give customers the “illusion of choice,” but with the rise of streaming platforms, there is no physical space for these films. 

When it comes to the “exodus of film production” from the U.S., Menet and others see viable solutions other than the tariffs. For one, he and Muellner suggested that the federal government could support the film industries through subsidies. There are already several countries that do this such as Germany, France and Canada.

Jack Reeves, junior DePaul film student, said states could do the same.

“To actually help, they should be providing more tax breaks for individual states, like Georgia has,” he said.

Reeves thinks these financial benefits would further incentivize filmmakers and studios to film in the United States more than tariffs would.

Whether or not the foreign film tariffs go into effect, Menet encourages film students to find a “place where you’re going to call home as your center of work, that you enjoy living in, that you have a good community and (where) you’re able to hopefully carve out a career for yourself.” 

“You’re essentially going to have to ride out the waves,” Menet said.

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