The Buzzmeter - Sinners Soars as Hollywood Panics Over "Tariffs"

It's hard to overstate what a phenomenon Sinners is now. It's such a thrill to see an audience enjoying a movie like this. Moviegoers are returning to see it over and over again. So far, we don't have a record yet, but according to this TikTok user, some have that number in the 20s. This is today's generation's Jaws. I know that would make Ryan Coogler happy. He wanted to make a movie like the movies he used to see back in the 1990s. He has achieved that and then some.

The box office for Sinners is ridiculous. This is what happens when a movie makes money because it's actually good, not because the audience identifies with a brand. We're not used to seeing this kind of turnout because it so rarely happens now. It used to happen all of the time. Movies stopped becoming a cultural event. But Sinners has. Boy has it ever. Last year, Wicked was the phenom, making me wonder if the Oscar for Best Picture will be between these two movies. It might be. But we have a long season ahead.

I am dreading talking about Trump's tariffs for a variety of reasons. The first is that I have tried to keep politics off this page. But that's not the biggest reason. No, it's dealing with the tsunami of overly emotional temper tantrums, self-righteous speeches, and bloviating. I have had enough after ten years of it by now.

Before we discuss tariffs, however, let's examine a column from the New York Times that calls what Hollywood is experiencing now an "extinction-level event."

This was from back in April of this month. The money shot:

“This is an existential crisis — it’s an extinction event,” said Beau Flynn, a producer of big-budget movies like “San Andreas,” which despite being about an earthquake in California was filmed mostly in Australia. “These are real things. I am not a dramatist, even though I’m in the drama field.”

Productions have been filmed outside the United States for decades, but rarely has Hollywood work been so bustling overseas at a time when work in Hollywood itself has been so scant. Studios in European countries are bursting at the seams, industry workers say. And film and television production in Los Angeles is down by more than one-third over the past 10 years, according to FilmLA data.

Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, who oversees film and television production for the union, said that roughly 18,000 full-time jobs have evaporated in the past three years, primarily in California.

Then, you must also factor in why movies are so expensive. Labor costs too much. Mandates across the board, like "intimacy coordinators" and whatnot, might not apply in overseas productions because the American film industry has become a puritanical hellhole. I can't imagine anyone wanting to hire anyone for fear of getting sued.

And so the next step is AI. You can't harass or abuse AI. They can work long hours for no pay, and they don't complain. AI is coming, whether we want it to or not. It's especially coming if Hollywood has given up on writing great screenplays (they have) or making great movies (they have, but for every once in a while). They try, but they are under constant pressure from everyone to cross all the t's and dot all the i's. There is no freedom to be had, not unless you are an acceptable person making an acceptable movie (aka, not heterosexual white men, for instance).

It's a mess. It's 1984 meets Brave New World meets Salem, Massachusetts. That is nothing art can survive. It's a miracle when it finds a way, as it has with Ryan Coogler's Sublime Sinners.

Because Trump is attempting to offer a solution, the fake resistance is going into overdrive, swirling once again in its haze of faux-WWII phantasmagoria. But let's just set aside the Trump Derangement Syndrome for a few moments and look at possible solutions to what is aimed exclusively at Oscar voters, despite Sinners and whatever other movies might be coming out this year.

Deadline, thankfully, has gone there for me, posting an exclusive of what Jon Voight brought to Trump to help save Hollywood:

EXCLUSIVE: Stop the presses! We have Jon Voight‘s proposal to “make Hollywood great again,” and you can read it in full.

Until now, specifics have been scant on the plan the Oscar-winner and Special Ambassador to Hollywood presented to Donald Trump this weekend “to see Hollywood thrive and make films bigger and greater than ever before, as he says, and see productions come back to America and Hollywood,” as Voight said Monday.

Now we know exactly what Voight put in front of Trump and some studios and streamers over the past week – and yes, it includes TV too.

Off the top, the Midnight Cowboy star seeks a 10%-20% federal tax credit that would be “stackable” on what states like California (which takes a drubbing in Voight’s document), Georgia and New York already provide. On the flip side, there’s a hammer that will come down. If a U.S.-based production “could have been produced in the U.S., but the producer elects to produce in a foreign country and receives a production tax incentive therefor, a tariff will be placed on that production equal to 120% of the value of the foreign incentive received,” the proposal given to Trump exclaims.

And this:

This follows, as Deadline reported exclusively Friday, Voight, his special adviser Steven Paul and SP Media Group/Atlas Comics President Scott Karol sitting down with unions, government officials and executives around town earlier this year. Voight’s plan was handed to Trump at Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, the day before POTUS went online Sunday and sent a chill through the industry when he declared he was seeking “a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands.” In the C-suite confusion and fallout from Trump’s announcement, California Gov. Gavin Newsom late last night urged Trump to get behind a $7.5 billion national incentive program.

And this:

Outside of direct incentives, Voight’s proposal has a bombshell for streamers.

In the proposal, he pitches a significant ownership shift between streamers like Netflix and producers. To that, a return to the shuttered Financial Interest and Syndication Rule is suggested with the hope to overturn what Voight calls “Draconian licensing terms.” In subjective terms similar to measures used in the UK and Canada, Voight and team want eligible productions to “meet a minimum threshold AMERICAN “Cultural Test”

You can read the whole proposal here.

My own opinion on this is the same as it always has been. The thing I've been saying repeatedly for about five years now. The solution is: MAKE BETTER MOVIES. I don't know about the cheaper films overseas but I do know that almost no one I know even goes to the movies anymore. Surely, if movies were better, there would be higher profits, and studios wouldn't have to worry so much about spiraling production costs. But maybe that's a naive take. I don't think, the way Hollywood is now, that tariffs make sense because at the moment, all of the best movies (other than Sinners) are coming from overseas. So does that mean we just won't get them anymore? Bad plan.

I will say that international features released here don't make money either. Nothing makes money now (except Sinners and IP franchise movies, sequels or remakes).

To make better movies, Hollywood needs a DOGE—fire everyone. Hire people who can make movies. Hire people who know how to make them, know how to write them, and how to direct them. Stop trying to fix the world with social justice. Dogma does not belong in art or the film business. Get it out. Do what they did in the 1950s when the Hays Code was choking the life out of movies: get rid of the "woke" code. That will mean getting over yourselves. You are not superior to the other half of the country.

I continue to find it odd and unsettling that the Left of this country acts as though they won the election or at least is in denial that Trump won. It is like the last Civil War when the South refused to give up its utopian bubble. When the people speak up, those at the top should listen to them, in politics and Hollywood.

Or, at the very least, don't take anything away but add to what is already there. Something has to change.

I imagine Trump will back off the tariffs. His method is to start the bid by asking for too much, then wait for negotiations and scale back—the art of the deal.

From Jeff Wells at Hollywood-Elsewhere:

After freaking out most of Hollywood last night with a pledge to impose a 100% tariff on foreign-made films, Orange Plague[the twice-elected president] has been softening his stance or, if you will, turning tail. Which is good!

Earlier today Variety‘s Pat Saperstein reported that President Trump told White House journos that he would meet with Hollywood film honchos to discuss his tariff plan, but that he’s “not looking to hurt the industry…I want to help the industry…I want to make sure they’re happy with it, because we’re all about jobs.” In other words, he was preparing to cave.

And now Variety‘s Gene Maddaus has just reported that Jon Voight, whose Sunday (5.4) visit with Trump at Mar a Lago riled things up as well as incited the tariff pledge…Voight, says Maddaus, is doing what he can to turn down the heat on this story while trying to to sound like a measured, sensible MAGA guy with a plan.

Voight and producing partner Steven Paul told Maddaus that they have submitted to President Trump “a comprehensive” plan to rescue the entertainment industry.”

Maddaus: “The plan includes federal incentives for production and post-production, as well as infrastructure subsidies for theater owners, job training, and other changes to the tax code. The plan also calls for tariffs in ‘certain limited circumstances.’”

“The President loves the entertainment business and this country, and he will help us make Hollywood great again,” Voight said in a statement.

In short, Trump has apparently decided to back away from the hardcore tariff thing, and Voight is setting the stage for that extremely welcome capitulation.

This is potentially a good thing for Hollywood. We can't just sit on our hands.