Regardless of whether anything comes of Trump’s pledge to “fix” Hollywood with tariffs (see below), the 86-year-old actor flexed big-time by getting every studio executive who won’t cast him in a movie to now fear what he will do to all movies. Runner-up: Tim Sweeney, C.E.O. of Fortnite developer Epic Games, who can celebrate a U.S. judge ruling that Apple improperly prevented App Store apps from pointing customers to places they could buy stuff without having to pay the 30 percent “Apple Tax.” Sweeney has basically carried every app on his back in this litigation. Tariff Watch honorable mention: Thunderbolts is the first big American movie to open in China since the trade war began, and it bowed to $10.4 million—almost exactly what Captain America: Brave New World debuted to in February. So if the Chinese are trying to bury U.S. films that have been let into the country, the numbers don’t show it yet. Less honorable for Marvel…: For the second year in a row, summer kicked off meh. Thunderbolts generated only $74 million, Disney’s lowest May opening for a Marvel movie ever. (Thor, released in 2011 by Paramount, opened to $65 million on its way to $450 million worldwide.) More concerning: Since the pandemic, the average new superhero movie has opened to $55 million, 41 percent less than from 2015 to 2019. Also concerning: A new comic book film hasn’t generated a sequel since Black Panther in 2018, per FranchiseRe. Can Thunderbolts, a.k.a. New Avengers, get to that magic $500 million number and guarantee a stand-alone sequel?

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“Did you think I’m only half the Jeremy because I got ran over?” —Jeremy Renner, on the High Performance podcast, regarding Disney asking him to take a 50 percent pay cut for a second season of Hawkeye. (Shh, nobody tell Renner the show attracted middling viewership and costs would have come down across the board for a Season 2—that is, if execs weren’t lowballing him in the first place so they could pin the cancellation on him, not them.) Runner-up: “I want this in as many theaters for as long as possible.” —Rian Johnson, talking to Business Insider about his theatrical dreams for his upcoming Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man. Note to Ted Sarandos: No, the theaters issue isn’t going away. It’s actually getting worse because everyone knows Greta Gerwig got theaters. Why shouldn’t Johnson, whose Glass Onion grossed $15 million on 600 screens for one week in 2022, get the same treatment from Netflix now? Okay, now on to the big tariff news…

The proper response to the past 24 hours in Hollywood has, for sure, been holy shit. But maybe not for the reason you might think. Amid the sea of questions about Donald Trump’s Sunday evening promise to levy a 100 percent tariff on movies “that are produced in Foreign Lands,” three things are almost certainly true:

As with most Trump proclamations, this one is likely just noise—another attention-seeking missile launched into the news cycle after spending the weekend in a Mar-a-Lago conga line with “special ambassador” Jon Voight and his manager, Steven Paul. Trump is using tariff talk to try to extract concessions from former allies, and there’s no reason to believe the Hollywood tariffs aren’t part of a broader war of words with countries like Canada. After all, the media spent Monday mostly talking about Trump “fixing Hollywood” (and possibly reopening Alcatraz??) instead of the cratering economy. Mission accomplished. But… if this whole tariff blowup isn’t just noise, what if it’s actually an opportunity for Hollywood rather than a potential death sentence? Multiple times already, Trump and his people have walked back the tariff talk. This morning, the White House issued a statement with “no final decisions” and “exploring all options” language. Then Trump himself clarified: “I’m not looking to hurt the industry, I want to help the industry,” he said, promising that his team would meet with Hollywood leaders to make sure “they’re happy.” (Maybe that’s genuine; maybe Gibson had already delivered an expletive-filled, “sugar tits”-level rant on the phone.) When the press release from Voight and Paul finally hit inboxes this afternoon with the plan to “Make Hollywood Great Again,” the tariffs were positioned as relevant only in “certain limited circumstances”—almost an afterthought. I’m told that jibes with what MPA chief Charlie Rivkin briefed his member studios last week while talking with the Voight team, and the Times noted that drafts of the two documents that emerged from Voight’s meetings around town made no mention of tariffs. Instead, the 86-year-old Midnight Cowboy star is focusing on a proposed combination of tax code changes and federal incentives, co-production treaties, and subsidies for infrastructure. All buzzwords until we see specifics, but not hardcore tariff language. “We look forward to working with the administration, the unions, studios, and streamers to help form a plan to keep our industry healthy and bring more productions back to America,” Voight said in the release.

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Assuming that’s not total B.S.—a big if these days—think about how much of a vibe shift this would be from the White House, which has repeatedly villainized Hollywood. Going after entertainment and media elites is a pretty major pillar of the MAGA movement—Google “Trump vs. Hollywood” for some of the greatest hits. Now Trump wants to be the industry’s savior, even as he tries to decimate arts institutions like PBS and NPR? Maybe Voight, in proclaiming that the president “loves the entertainment business,” momentarily forgot that the same company that owns Paramount Pictures also controls CBS News, which Trump is suing for $20 billion. Disney is a perpetual punching bag. Universal, which Voight “looks forward” to working with, is a sister company of nemesis MSNBC. Whatever. Nothing makes sense, and for some reason, Trump thinks that publicly declaring his desire to “help” Hollywood is good politics. He’s already won statements of interest from industry unions, most of whose members have suffered amid the production exodus to jurisdictions beyond their reach. “We look forward to learning more about the specifics of the plan announced by the President and to advancing a dialogue to achieve our common goals,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the SAG-AFTRA leader, said today. IATSE praised the effort to “level the playing field.” Trump, ever courting the Teamsters for their populist bona fides, must have loved those quotes.

But is this actually good politics—specifically, this idea of revising the tax code to incentivize U.S. production? If the U.K. offered, say, a 40 percent rebate, could the U.S. then offer a base incentive that would encourage various states to supplement with their own in order to remain competitive globally? That would be a lot more effective than either of the incentives bills under consideration in California and New York, both of which are already considered improvements to the status quo. It would be amazing for everyone who works in Hollywood and enjoys seeing their families. But this would require Congress to get involved, which seems like… a stretch. Not surprisingly, Adam Schiff, the U.S. senator who formerly represented the L.A. area in the House, has been lobbying for just such a federal incentive. But can you imagine Republican legislators, amid record deficits, adding a new tax break that exclusively helps Hollywood people? Where’s the upside in red states? Maybe they see an opportunity to take a shot at Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom, whom Trump labeled “incompetent” today, or simply bring him to his knees. Tonight, Newsom announced that he wanted to work with the administration to create a $7.5 billion federal film tax credit—a well-timed announcement for the twin purposes of trolling Trump and currying favor with Southern Californians, but one unlikely to lead to momentum with the MAGA crowd. Newsom’s new pitch only highlights that California and L.A. politicians have incompetently sat on their hands for years as the region’s signature industry dwindled in plain sight, even as its leaders and unions donated millions to their political campaigns. And yet, that’s probably not enough of a reason for Republicans to vote to start subsidizing Hollywood workers like they’re farmers. I’ve been emailing with Schuyler Moore, the veteran film finance lawyer, who was just as shocked as you and I were when he saw the tariff “proposal” last night. He agreed the tariffs idea is stupid, and that a federal incentive package is a long shot, and he reminded me that there’s already a production incentive in Section 181 of the Internal Revenue Code. But it’s a tax deduction (not a credit) of up to just $15 million in U.S. spend, which Moore has called “worthless.” Could the tariff conversation lead to support for a new, supersized federal tax credit? “I don’t think it will morph into that,” Moore wrote when I raised the possibility. “If it does, then it depends on what it morphs into. If it morphs into an uncapped Section 181 deduction, it is as useless as Section 181 is now.” So that’s where we are. Everyone’s freaking out about a potentially catastrophic tariff event that likely won’t happen, and there’s a potentially beneficial change to the tax code that could be a hidden opportunity in all this noise but also probably won’t happen. Instead, Trump likely will move on to his next attention-seeking missile, which will dominate the next news cycle. Still, this whole episode is notable for the president’s abrupt—if potentially momentary—shift from proud adversary of Hollywood and everything it represents to self-styled savior of the industry that made him famous in the first place. Certainly not what most of us predicted for the first year of Trump 2.0. Any kind of federal tax credit for movie productions would be a welcome and unexpected gift coming from this government. And even if it never happens, if this Trump vibe shift sticks, it could be a chance for Hollywood to capitalize on the chaos in other ways.

Speaking of incentives, the Times calculated that every New York taxpayer contributed exactly $20.90 to the production of Blue Bloods. Tell your grandparents to thank you. [NY Times] Google is quietly funding film and TV production through a partnership with Range Media Partners to help promote its products, so get ready to pitch your mid-range indie about a kid who uses an Android to solve murders. [Business Insider] SXSW got Golden Globes-ed: quietly taken over by Jay Penske, who fired the people who built the event, installed a PMC crony in their place, and will now callously exploit the brand without scrutiny from the trade press he owns. [NY Times] Watch out, Disney: Chuck E. Cheese is launching a media network of in-store programming. [QSR] Good for Sony’s Tom Rothman for suing over his removal from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting board, but I do wonder if his bosses in Tokyo will be as supportive if Trump comes after them. [THR] I’m officially on board with the latest reinvention of MoviePass as a box office betting app. [Verge] The Tonys mostly shat on the big stars slumming it on Broadway this season. Taking vanity roles for awards should be a Hollywood thing only.  [Telegraph] Lauren Sherman is basically begging Blake Lively to get a stylist. [Puck]

Minimal good feedback while I was sick, so here are a few interesting tariff-related messages I got today… “I think you need to factor in the very significant currency benefit when you talk about the war over tax incentives in global production. Studios are getting an additional 25 percent to 30 percent benefit when they move production to Canada, U.K., Australia, Prague, Hungary, and New Zealand. The Canadian dollar is $0.72, Aus dollar is $0.63, New Zealand dollar is $0.60, pound and euro are relatively cheap compared to the U.S. dollar. As much as anything, this is the reason production is moving abroad.” —An executive “You think I should sell my London place?” —A filmmaker “This feels right to Trump because he knows Hollywood is ultimately a union town, and the union people have been betrayed by this industry. We are so ready to flip to any political or business figure who shows that they give a shit about us.” —A below-the-line technician “I think the tax code piece is too nuanced for Trump. It’s more likely they say to the studios that they have to remit the foreign tax credits to the U.S. Treasury. ‘Hi, Disney. You received a $70 million payment from the U.K. government for Season 1 of Andor. If you produce Season 3 there, you will owe those funds to us.’” —A film finance executive “Wait until Trump slaps a 25 percent tariff on foreign NBA players. Make American basketball great again! Luka Dončić is going to cost the Lakers 25 percent more.” —A producer

Have a great week, Matt Got a question, comment, complaint, or your Met Gala umbrella holder power ranking? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

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