The Los Angeles Times announces as a breaking story, "Looking to boost the production of Hollywood movies in the U.S., President Trump on Sunday announced a new 100% tariff applied on films produced overseas. For more than two decades, major studios have shifted movie production to cheaper countries, including Canada, U.K., Bulgaria, New Zealand, and Australia that offer generous tax benefits to build their local economies, luring films away from Hollywood".
NZ politicians, being out of touch with the speed with which things move in Washington these days, told us that our exports into the US would be tariffed at a 10% rate. That appears to have all changed as of a few hours ago - with specific goods & services now being targeted, including NZ's heavily subsidized movie industry.
National better get with the picture. Just one month ago, Finance Minister Willis confirmed her government would continue with the Film Sector Production Tax rebate. Between 2014 and 2022, $1.15bn was spent on it. (Willis lives in Wellington, so pouring limitless subsidies into Wellington is good with her).
Ironically The Post reported last month Willis "celebrated the release of the latest locally made blockbuster, A Minecraft Movie". Seems she celebrated too hard. Maybe Trump read about Willis' bragging rights, which is why he announced today, "Other countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers & studios away from the US .. Hollywood & other areas within the USA are being devastated".
National should immediately end all screen rebates since no studio will likely want to produce in NZ when it can't sell its movies back into America. Lets see what Titanic Director James Cameron & Peter Jackson say from their (subsidized) Wairarapa bases.
Professor Robert MacCulloch holds the Matthew S. Abel Chair of Macroeconomics at Auckland University. He has previously worked at the Reserve Bank, Oxford University, and the London School of Economics. He runs the blog Down to Earth Kiwi from where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
Where is our invitation to the White House? Why doesn't Luxon make an attempt to get onside with the US? Didn't he work in the US, so surely has some idea how they operate? He might have been a CEO of an airline (which personally we avoided flying on to the US), however he seems to have no diplomatic skills whatsoever. New Zealand will be the loser in all this.
As an American living in New Zealand, I completely agree with Trump on this one.
The film industry in Auckland is vastly larger than Wellington. Also, it's a rebate on money spent. Not a subsidy. And... Minecraft was filmed in Auckland. If the rebates are ended tomorrow there will be zero offshore funded films being shot in NZ. They will overnight move to other territories, such as Australia which offers a 25% rebate and an industry that is 10x the size of New Zealand's largely Auckland based one.
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