Since Sunday night, Hollywood has been trying to make heads or tails of President Trump’s bombshell proposal to levy 100% tariffs on films made outside of the U.S.

Ostensibly, the Trump tariff plan is part of an effort to bring Hollywood productions back home, after decades of runaway production.

Remarkably few movies are made entirely in the U.S. — let alone Los Angeles — because studios have been lured abroad to countries including Canada, Britain, Australia, Hungary and Bulgaria by generous government incentives. Special effects are often outsourced overseas.

This has contributed to what leaders in California now call a crisis for the state’s production economy. The Los Angeles area also faces stiff competition from other states, including Georgia and New York.

So Trump has clearly identified a real problem, though the solution he offered is questionable, to say the least. Filmmakers say they want to shoot in the States but need help to make it financially feasible. Tariffs won’t help with that. In fact, they’ll make it worse.

“It’s great that the president is starting to pay attention,” said Jeffrey Greenstein, who has produced movies shot in multiple countries. “So let’s have a real conversation about it and figure out the best way to start bringing movies back.”

The chaotic and vague way Trump’s plan was announced sent studio executives scrambling to figure out what it all meant. The notion seemed ill-thought-out and knee-jerk, many producers said.

How do you even put a tariff on movies, which are distributed digitally? Why tariffs, rather than a robust national tax credit program, which many in the industry have advocated for?

“Nobody knows and I don’t suspect we will for awhile,” said one executive who was not authorized to comment. “Is [the tariff] on domestically funded foreign productions? Is it on foreign funded ones? Is the tariff on film revenues or film costs on those projects or both, etc., etc., etc. What constitutes a feature? Who knows.”

Who knows, indeed.

Before Sunday’s announcement, actor Jon Voight, one of Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood, traveled to Florida with his manager Steven Paul for a meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to present a plan for the film industry. Ideas addressed included federal tax incentives, job training and “tariffs in certain limited circumstances,” according to a statement from Paul’s production company.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has now called on Trump to create a $7.5-billion federal film tax credit program. The governor’s office reached out to the White House Monday evening to encourage Trump to work with California to create a federal credit modeled after the state’s program.

Some executives and producers said the tariff idea would hasten Hollywood’s demise rather than save it, because of the increased costs for studios that are already under financial pressure. Reciprocal tariffs from other territories could follow. China is already getting more restrictive for American movies thanks to Trump trade policies.

Already, there are signs that the administration might be walking the proposal back, leaving entertainment business analysts to doubt that the idea will actually go into effect.

Nonetheless, the turmoil could cast a pall over the Cannes Film Festival this month, where a lot of indie movie deals happen.

“It still creates a headache for the film business and particularly indie film if there is yet more uncertainty in an already fragile marketplace, particularly among the banks and investors,” said Stuart Ford, head of Los Angeles-based film and TV company AGC Studios.

Just what Hollywood needs — more uncertainty.

Read my colleagues Meg James and Samantha Masunaga for more on the tariff situation.

IFC’s new look at 25 years old

Indie movie stalwart IFC Films has seen dramatic changes in the specialty film market since it launched 25 years ago.

The challenges are real, as streaming changes moviegoer habits and the box office continues to creep back from the pandemic doldrums. Meanwhile, newer entrants — including A24, Neon and Angel Studios — have reshaped the business by establishing themselves as fresh brands that mean something to their target audiences.

The types of movies that draw independent film fans to theaters have also shifted radically, especially compared to the early 2000s when IFC released “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” by far its biggest hit. Even 2014, the year the company put out Richard Linklater’s best picture Oscar nominee “Boyhood,” seems a lifetime away.

The market now is younger and hungrier for horror movies, thrillers and edgy genre mashups. At the same time, the major Hollywood studios have, with few exceptions, turned their attention to broad-based tentpole movies, which gives companies like IFC an opportunity to make a bigger mark.

“The audience for what I would call specialty now is very different than it was a few years ago,” said IFC Entertainment Group head Scott Shooman. “It’s not just older-skewing dramas anymore.”

With all that in mind, New York-based IFC on Tuesday unveiled a brand refresh, changing its name to Independent Film Co. As part of the rebranding effort, the company unveiled a new logo and a “customized audio logo” created by Adam “Adrock” Horovitz of the Beastie Boys.

Independent Film Company’s new logo.

The change is part of a broader rejiggering of film assets within parent company AMC Networks. Independent Film Co. will exist under the newly named IFC Entertainment Group, an umbrella that also includes the IFC Center movie theater, fellow distribution arm RLJE and the horror streaming service Shudder, which turns a decade old this year.

“As the consumer becomes more familiar with brands and who’s purveying the movies, it becomes important for us to refresh the brand,” Shooman said. “It’s gonna take the movies to fill it out, but that’s something that we look forward to doing.”

As the independent space has evolved, so has IFC’s strategy.

The company is aiming to release fewer films while taking bigger swings with more commercial-leaning movies and heftier budgets. Currently, the group releases about 50 movies a year, which according to Shooman is getting closer to the ideal number. About 30 of those releases are through the Shudder arm, a handful of which also go into theaters.

For the rest, 12 are from Independent Film Co. and eight are under the RLJE banner, and all of those are released theatrically. As the company refines its strategy, it’s moving further away from the foreign films and documentaries that helped define the brand years ago, though it will still do one or two of those a year, Shooman said.

“We’re gonna be sniper oriented on those and really make sure that they are the needle-moving films in that space,” he said.

IFC is coming off a strong couple of years, fielding commercial successes including Colin and Cameron Cairnes’ “Late Night With the Devil” and Chris Nash’s “In a Violent Nature,” along with prestigious titles such as “The Taste of Things” and the Academy Award-nominated stop-motion animated feature “Memoir of a Snail.”

Upcoming releases include Eli Craig’s “Clown in a Cornfield”; Sean Byrne’s thriller “Dangerous Animals,” which debuts at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight; and Jay Duplass’ “The Baltimorons.”

Essential to the larger IFC strategy is Shudder, which over the last 10 years has established itself as a destination for horror fans with its mix of new titles and handpicked library selections.

Shudder was, for example, the home of Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, “Revenge,” before she went on to make “The Substance.” It was also behind the 2022 experimental and divisive microbudget film “Skinamarink” from Kyle Edward Ball. Last year, it released “Oddity,” its second time working with Irish director Damian McCarthy.

“As we’re able to grow as a company, we’ve become synonymous with taste, with quality and with author-driven impactful horror,” said Emily Gotto, Shudder’s head of acquisitions and production.

Shudder prides itself on the way it curates its platform with a human touch, not by algorithm.

Some of Shudder’s best gets have been older, little-seen titles with which the company can make a splash. The best example perhaps was when the company secured the rights to the 1981 body horror classic “Possession,” which hadn’t been widely available through streaming or video on-demand.

That coup was a prime example of how the company can make “subscriber events” out of releasing older titles, said Shudder’s programming and acquisitions head Sam Zimmerman, who is in charge of curating the streamer’s offering.

Zimmerman said the company succeeds when “we follow our taste and our passion and release and make movies that take someone a foot further than they thought they were going to go that day.”

“Having that instinct confirmed is both surprising but exciting to me,” he said, “because I think that’s what people want out of horror.”

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