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.
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.
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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.
Outside of incentives directly, 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”
In case you are wondering who is in the crosshairs here, the proposal says it “applies to content produced for theatrical distribution; U.S. broadcast networks; U.S. cable channels; streaming services (including, e.g., Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Apple, Peacock, Paramount+ and Hulu); and digital platforms (e.g., YouTube, YouTube TV, X, Facebook)” — aka everyone.
Take a read here at what Voight wants MAGA Trump to do to MHGA: