THE Donald Trump He announced last weekend that the films have also been targeted to impose duties. “The film industry in America is dying very quickly,” he wrote on his social networking platform. “Other countries offer all kinds of incentives to pull our filmmakers and studios away from the United States … This is a coordinated effort from other nations and therefore a threat to national security. It is, in addition to all the other, messages and propaganda! ”He wrote features

Large overseas studios benefit from tax relief, cheaper workforce and other incentives for shooting London, New Zealand and Canada, among other countries. This is a reality that no one can deny. Medium and low budget films are often filmed in Eastern European countries such as Romania and Bulgaria for the same reasons.

However, the solution proposed by Trump is like … a chainsaw, in a condition that requires surgical scalpel.

How will you impose duties on movies? This is an art form. It’s not like a car or a TV where you buy individual accessories and assemble them on a product that comes in a shipping container. The films consist of ideas that come to life on the plate. Trump wants to invoice ticket prices? Proposes Blu-ray for foreign movies twice as expensive? What about flow services?

Most importantly, as the Professor of Finance noted Justin wolfersthe US exports many more movies and television broadcasts than they are introducing. Most Hollywood overproduction at least balances, if not exceeding, their domestic revenue with ticket sales abroad. So, if typically lucrative markets such as China, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia choose to impose retaliation on American films, that would be the definition itself, as Trump says, a “very fast death” for the “film industry”. China, for its part, threatened to do just that just a month ago, when Trump was not talking about movies yet.

But we are not just talking about financial losses. Art, in any medium, can offer different angles and unite communities. The films are particularly capable of exploring complex issues in a relatively narrow time frame. It is, and always, a global language for the exchange of our individual stories and ideas. The USA They have greatly benefited from this trade – so much so that Hollywood is considered one of the country’s major industries. Foreign movies allow more people to see themselves on the screen. They also inspire domestic filmmakers and contribute to the development of art. There are other, less high advantages for startup. Parasite’s South Korean success, for example, has generated $ 50 million in the US, with spectators spending money not only on tickets, but popcorn, candies and drinks, enhancing the results of the cinematic rooms.

The tariffs on the movies, it seems, have not been well studied. The White House has already released a statement, but the message cannot be overthrown. The most creepy words in Trump’s post last weekend were those who described “the other nations” as organizations to convey their own malicious “messages and propaganda”.

There is no reason to believe that the Trump government – in the name of its general interest in “National Security” – will not follow the same path. Some may believe that this is an exaggeration or paranoia. Perhaps…