It’s hard getting normal people to care about the politics of the film industry. Our demands always have to be hitched to some other kind of politics. California Senator Adam Schiff recently tried national security: “We have a lot of our influence around the world as a result of American film and TV,” as he put it. “We don’t want to lose that soft power.” Presumably he’s not talking about the enduring influence of John Huston and Robert Altman films, but rather Top Gun
and Transformers
movies made in collaboration with the Pentagon. What matters to someone like Schiff is the economic health of the industry — not whether American films are any good.
The unions aren’t exactly interested in the question either. Last year, I went to the quadrennial convention of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), which represents over 168,000 behind-the-scenes entertainment workers who are finding a way to make a living in the increasingly grueling industry, from stagehands to the “below-the-line” crews on film sets. Many speakers expressed pride in their work, but nobody talked about working on a good movie. I went with an insurgent reform caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-file Entertainment Workers (CREW), and while we had fruitful discussions about a broad range of democratic reforms and political perspectives, we never talked about film as an art form either. Occasionally someone would mention a production we were proud to have worked on, but usually as the setup for an embarrassing anecdote or a story about workplace conflict.
When we talk about what ails the film industry, it’s easy to focus on catastrophic economic shifts: the offshoring of production since the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes; theaters still struggling to recover from COVID-19; the networks and studios that chased Netflix like a pack of lemmings off the peak-streaming cliff. That’s a good way of working out who to blame and which powers to break up. But it doesn’t tell us what we’re fighting for, or how to care for the crowning achievement of American culture: our cinema.
Take the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, now on hold pending an antitrust trial next March. The deal poses a range of dangers to the industry. It would mean an unprecedented expansion of power for David Ellison, the man who installed right-wing provocateur Bari Weiss atop CBS News. Mergers like this are also a major driver of job loss. Some of that is standard postmerger restructuring, but this one would hit film crews especially hard, because two competitors collapsing into one means less film and TV gets made at all. And a combined Paramount–Warner Bros., saddled with debt, would have to concentrate on big films built from existing intellectual property that play well around the globe.
In the end, though, there’s really only one reason to oppose this merger: the films will be bad. The government, the studios, and the union won’t say it, because they all want to be seen as dealmakers rather than caretakers of a national culture. But it’s what matters most: the films will be bad, the TV will be bad, the news will be bad, and the audience for all of it will continue its precipitous decline.
You can’t tell any coherent story about American film’s current crisis without talking about the fact that few people in this country want to watch this crap anymore. Movie theater attendance is down 26 percent from 2019, a loss the industry considers permanent, and cable TV viewership is down 40 percent over the same period. Audiences are so tuned out of what they’re streaming that Matt Damon recently complained that Netflix executives had asked him to restate a film’s plot three or four times in the dialogue, so that viewers looking at their phones could follow along.
Industry analysts tend to blame new forms of media for the audience’s indifference. But you have to wonder whether part of the problem is that when you look up the weekend showtimes, what you find is a slate of sequels and movies about board games, most of them engineered to make the bulk of their gross overseas.
Good films are still being made, of course. But many of last year’s most interesting films set in America or made by American filmmakers — Bugonia
, The Testament of Ann Lee
, Nouvelle Vague
— were shot largely overseas. Forty-five percent of all US films were shot overseas in 2025, up from 33 percent in 2022.
The problem of runaway productions has been the single-minded focus of IATSE’s political strategy for several years now. The union’s panacea is a federal tax credit — a measure David Ellison also supports, since he would effectively get paid on either end: he’s currently saving money on the films he sends abroad, but he would also get a tax break on the films he shoots at home. Backing the measure won him the support of IATSE, which declined to join the Writers Guild of America and twelve state attorneys general in opposing the Paramount merger. Add in the fact that the union is asking for a lifeline from the most anti-labor administration since Ronald Reagan’s, and you can understand why it might curry favor with David Ellison, son of Trump consigliere Larry Ellison.
But there are other solutions to this problem. If you’ll indulge me for a minute, reader, consider the French, who have spent decades struggling to protect their film culture from the onslaught of Adam Schiff’s “soft power” cinema. To keep French film good, France has experimented with a variety of subsidies and protectionist measures over the years. Its implementation of the European Union’s Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMSD), for example, requires cable companies and streamers operating in the country to invest 20 percent of their French revenue in French film and TV. Streamers like Netflix not only accede to these demands; they often double the budgets of the films they invest in, and those films bring in higher ticket sales. Everyone made fun of Trump when he proposed a tariff on foreign films — but the AVMSD isn’t so far off from one.
Many of the revolutionary movements in French cinema came about not only through experimentation on set but through direct engagement between filmmakers and the state. The French New Wave, for example, found a kindred spirit in the novelist, intellectual, and pathological fabulist André Malraux, who was running Charles de Gaulle’s Ministry of Cultural Affairs just as the New Wave was ascendant. French directors lobbied Malraux for a new kind of film subsidy, the avance sur recettes (advance on receipts), which lets a jury award films funding based on artistic merit. He also loosened the requirements for the professional filmmaker’s card so that mavericks like Jean-Luc Godard and his cinematographer Raoul Coutard could qualify.
The legacy of French film subsidies is complicated. Their current iteration is built on a public-private partnership with pay-TV channels like Canal+, giving Gallic David Ellisons like Vincent Bolloré the power to reshape art house cinema around a right-wing agenda. Even before Bolloré, critics like Richard Brody argued that the subsidies incentivized a crop of movies engineered to look “artistically significant” to the state — the enduring legacy of what François Truffaut derided as the “tradition of quality,” an affliction the New Wave tried to cure with a steady diet of Sam Fuller and Nicholas Ray.
But all of this is preferable to what counts as government action in the United States, where the film industry moves from state to state like a traveling medicine show, promising jobs and economic stimulus in exchange for ever-larger tax breaks. After a while, the state realizes the return on investment is minimal, and the show goes back on the road. Sometimes the producers pull up stakes overnight, headed for a state or country offering a better deal; Marvel’s recent abandonment of Atlanta for the UK is a case in point. Meanwhile, California, desperate to keep Los Angeles running as a company town, has raised its base tax credit from 20 percent to 35 percent, with bonuses that can push it to 40. Film workers are caught in the middle, either chasing the industry from town to town and country to country like clowns in a traveling international circus, or toughing it out in a production hub whose city services are struggling to survive on a shrinking tax base. And for all that, the films still suck.
If our metric is the health of American cinema, arguably the most successful government intervention was a New Deal–era antitrust suit that led to a late-blooming ruling known, appropriately enough, as the Paramount Decree. The decree broke up the vertically integrated studio system, in which production, distribution, and exhibition were all controlled by a handful of companies. Once the studios gave up control of exhibition and theaters could suddenly play whatever they wanted, independent producers and distributors like Roger Corman stepped into the vacuum. Fittingly, the Trump Justice Department had the decree terminated in 2020.
Recently, a friend and I were trying to catch Corman’s cameo in The Silence of the Lambs
. My friend had never seen a picture of him, so I described him as “an American version of the thin Buddha.” That captures his face, anyway; his personality was more Wallace Stevens: insurance executive by day, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet by night. Whoever he reminds you of, Corman was an American original.
As a distributor, Corman brought Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman to American audiences, often recutting their trailers to play up European attitudes toward nudity and sex. As a producer, he trained an entire generation of American auteurs: Martin Scorsese, Jack Nicholson, Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Hopper, Peter Bogdanovich, James Cameron, and Polly Platt all found themselves in his orbit at one time or another. The films themselves were cheap exploitation fare: Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, The Wild One
knockoffs, low-budget monster movies. They were formulaic, but in the wonderfully open-ended way Hollywood films used to be. Corman would give a director two weeks to shoot and one day with Vincent Price. As long as the director followed a few simple rules — nudity or a fight every ten minutes — he was free to make any movie he wanted.
The Bell Labs–esque environment of Roger Corman’s studio was, admittedly, historically overdetermined: the first generation of film-school brats met the counterculture, met Godard, met a visionary exploitation producer. But it also grew out of a policy choice. And that’s reason to believe our political horizons have been artificially circumscribed, especially when it comes to the question of whether America can still make good films.
It’s not my intention to air my union’s dirty laundry in the pages of Jacobin
. If I’m focusing on IATSE, it’s because I’m looking for someone, anyone, in our industry or our democracy who can build the power and the coalitions necessary to make the health and stability of this art form a national political priority. I think the only body with that kind of power is the union. If I’m critical of what the union has done to date, it’s because I think we’ve been sold a bill of goods by our paid lobbyists, who have hemmed in our sense of what is politically achievable.
If we want the jobs to come home, why can’t we build coalitions with unions in other sectors that also want a more aggressive antitrust agenda? We could also be more vocal in our support for single-payer health care. When Marvel moved its productions from Atlanta to London, the Wall Street Journal
noted that British crews are generally paid less and studios there don’t have to cover their health insurance. And if we have to make a deal with the devil, why aren’t we advocating for something like the AVMSD instead of a film tariff? These aren’t quixotic leftist pipe dreams. They are all policies that have been enacted before and proven to work. They should be on the political agenda of anyone who cares about cinema: the directors, the writers, the union, and the audience.
