The slow drain of American film and television production to Britain, Canada, Australia and central Europe — each dangling tax breaks that Hollywood’s home turf never matched — has finally done what strikes, awards fights and turf wars never could: put the industry’s studios and its unions on exactly the same side. A federal production incentive, the idea that the country might reward shooting on U.S. soil the way individual states and rival nations already do, has become the rare cause with almost no organized opposition anywhere in the business.
That consensus is what gives Donald Trump’s intervention its weight. Doubling down a day after first backing the push, he framed it in his usual cadence — “jobs, jobs, jobs and production, production, production” — and called for lawmakers to “approve, immediately, a Federal Production Incentive to create Entertainment Jobs in America.” As Deadline first reported, he insists the measure, informally the Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act, already enjoys “great bipartisan response and support.”
The union embrace is striking for a business that has spent recent years at one another’s throats. SAG-AFTRA — whose president Sean Astin and national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland called production “the lifeblood of our industry and the communities that support it” — had already endorsed a federal credit when a 20%-to-25% version was first floated. IATSE, Teamsters Local 399, the Directors and Writers guilds and the Motion Picture Association have all since lined up behind it, the MPA’s Charles Rivkin casting it as “a landmark step toward bringing more production to local communities in all 50 states.”
Behind the applause, the specifics stay stubbornly blank. The MPA — working with Jon Voight, one of the president’s Hollywood emissaries — has pushed a 20% credit for U.S.-based productions, yet the statements coming from the top attach no percentage, no cap and no cost estimate. Whether the incentive would be refundable or transferable, how it would sit alongside California’s freshly expanded program, and which productions would even qualify all remain unwritten, the actual text said to be taking shape behind closed doors with an unveiling promised as “imminent.” The lobbying that produced this moment — from Voight, from Paramount chief David Ellison, from the MPA — has run for months, ever since the administration first floated tariffs on foreign-made films as the blunt-instrument alternative to a credit.
It is a strange sort of milestone: a subsidy nearly every guild, studio and trade group in town can cheer precisely because no one has yet had to fight over its price. The MPA wants 20%; the messaging from Washington says only “immediately.” For an industry that lives and dies by above- and below-the-line budgets, Hollywood is, for once, united behind a line item with no figure in the box.
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