President Donald Trump used a social media post to reignite Washington’s fight over runaway movie production, pushing Congress to approve federal tax incentives before more of the industry packs up for good.
“We will bring this once great industry BACK TO AMERICA,” Trump wrote Sunday on TRUTH Social, a post that also described the industry’s current state as a “Complete and Total Disaster” producing “very little work” compared to years past.
His real target was Congress, not Hollywood itself.
“Congress should approve, immediately, a Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America,” he wrote, pointing to what he called the Motion Picture, Television and Entertainment Revitalization Act.
“It should be Bipartisan, especially since so much money is being lost in California, and other largely Blue States,” Trump added, framing runaway production as one of the rare issues both parties should agree on.
The frustration is backed by real numbers, even if the fix remains untested. Forty-five percent of American movies and scripted TV shows were shot overseas last year, up from roughly a third in 2022, and Los Angeles alone has shed more than 40,000 production jobs since 2022 as studios chase cheaper deals in Canada, the United Kingdom and beyond.
Trump insists the incentive would pay for itself.
Related: Trump Promises 100% Tariff for Movies Made Outside U.S…Again
“Tenfold by the money pouring into the Treasury’s coffers,” he claimed the government would recoup, though he offered no percentages or dollar figures for what the incentive would actually look like.
Jon Voight, the actor Trump named Special Ambassador to Hollywood, has reportedly met with the president directly to push the proposal, shuttling it between studio executives and the White House ahead of this latest post.
“A landmark step toward bringing more production to local communities in all 50 states,” is how Motion Picture Association CEO Charles Rivkin described the proposal, one of several industry leaders to back it publicly.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass endorsed the push as “a positive step forward,” and supervising sound designer Karen Baker Landers, who has watched production work dry up firsthand, called federal incentives “a game changer” for both California and the country. Sen. Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, has made a similar case for months — that state-level tax credits alone can’t compete with what other countries dangle in front of studios.
This isn’t Trump’s first swing at the runaway-production problem. Movieguide® reported last year when he threatened a 100% tariff on movies made outside the United States, a plan that ran headfirst into the fact that movies are legally exempt from a president’s standard tariff authority — and that the Supreme Court was already weighing how far that authority even reaches.
A tax incentive sidesteps that legal tangle entirely, which may be why Trump is leaning on Congress this time rather than executive order. Whether Republicans and Democrats can actually agree on a bill remains the open question.
But the pressure campaign — Voight’s ambassadorship, Rivkin’s praise, Bass’s endorsement — suggests Washington may be closer to acting than it has been in years.
For Christian families watching where their favorite stories get made, the stakes reach past jobs and tax code. Every production that leaves Los Angeles for London or Toronto takes with it the crews, faith consultants and community ties that shape what eventually reaches the screen, and a Congress serious about bringing Hollywood home is worth watching for how it treats the industry once it’s back.
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