After reportedly cooking up movie tariff idea, Jon Voight lays out a plan to save Hollywood

"Ambassador to Hollywood" Jon Voight plans to make Hollywood great again with the help of, get this, tax incentives.

By Matt Schimkowitz | May 5, 2025 | 7:44pm

Photo by Mark Wilson (Getty Images)

Film News Jon Voight

After reportedly cooking up movie tariff idea, Jon Voight lays out a plan to save Hollywood

As he has done for the longest four months in recorded history, President Trump upended another industry last night, announcing a “100 percent tariff” on movies produced outside the U.S. The news sent Hollywood into a tariff tailspin, with many in show business spending the day wondering what qualifies a film as “foreign.” Hollywood unions, like SAG-AFTRA, are willing to humor the President’s idea if it brings production back to the States. Others, like the Teamsters, gave it a full-throated endorsement, unsurprisingly. Cutting through the red tape with some pretty standard ideas for how to fix Tinseltown is Trump-appointed “Ambassador to Hollywood” Jon Voight, who reportedly gave Trump the movie tariff idea and has a plan to fix it all.

Per The Hollywood Reporter, Voight and his business partner, Steven Paul, plan to use federal tax incentives, tax code changes, and subsidies for theater owners and production companies to help bring these jobs back to America. Meanwhile, tariffs in Voight’s plan would only be used “in certain limited circumstances.” That last bit is a reversal from Trump’s Truth post, which insisted he was instituting a “100 percent tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” Such a rule would’ve made things tricky for Voight, whose 2024 film, The Painter, was shot in Vancouver. But we’re sure that all this tariff business is an excuse to have studio executives pledge fealty to the President as he executes his plan recklessly and enriches himself overseas.