Netflix ceo lobbied trump directly to kill movie tariffs
Ted Sarandos didn't wait for Washington to make up its mind. The Netflix co-CEO went straight to Donald Trump and made his case against tariffs on foreign film and television productions — and he believes it worked. "He's raised tariffs for the film and television industry many times, and I hope I've convinced him not to apply them," Sarandos told Politico in a recent interview.
Why sarandos drew a hard line against tariffs
The argument isn't complicated, but the stakes are enormous. Netflix is expected to spend up to $20 billion on content this year, and a significant chunk of that flows through productions made outside the United States. Titles like All Quiet on the Western Front, Squid Game, and Adolescence didn't just perform well — they redefined what a streaming hit looks like. The ability to turn a South Korean thriller or a German war drama into a global phenomenon is one of the few things that genuinely separates Netflix from every competitor chasing it.
A blanket tariff on foreign productions would hit that model hard. The structure of such a levy isn't even legally clear yet — a film is not a physical good you can slap a customs fee on at the border — but the financial exposure for Netflix would be real regardless of how the mechanism gets designed.
Trump's original pitch and why it stalled
Back in May, Trump announced on Truth Social a proposal to impose a 100% tariff on films produced outside the United States. The stated goal was to reverse the slow bleed of production jobs out of Hollywood and other traditional filming hubs, which Trump described as being "devastated" by aggressive incentive programs offered by foreign governments. London, in particular, has pulled significant work away from Los Angeles over the past decade through tax relief packages that American studios find hard to ignore.
A White House spokesperson said shortly after the announcement that "no final decisions" had been made and that the administration was still "exploring all options." That non-committal language gave Sarandos his opening.
The counter-offer: incentives, not penalties
Rather than simply lobbying against the tariffs, Sarandos came with an alternative. His pitch to Trump centers on domestic tax incentives as the smarter tool for bringing production back to American soil. "Incentive programs attract a lot of production, and you've seen how many of them have moved from California to Georgia and to New Jersey," he told Politico. "Having the incentives instead of the tariffs is much better."
It's a position grounded in observable market behavior. States that built competitive incentive frameworks pulled work out of California without any tariff on foreign competitors — just by making the math work for producers. Sarandos is essentially arguing that the same logic scales nationally, and that punishing foreign content would trigger retaliation against American productions abroad long before it revived a single job in Los Angeles.
What actually hangs in the balance
The irony here is that the tariff debate lands at a moment when Netflix's international strategy is arguably its strongest asset. While domestic streaming growth has plateaued across the industry, the company's ability to source, develop, and export non-English content has given it a structural advantage that no amount of domestic-only production could replicate. Threatening that pipeline with tariffs wouldn't make Hollywood great again — it would hand an advantage to platforms without the same global infrastructure to lose.
Sarandos has made his bet. Whether Trump holds to the no-tariff position or pivots again with a Truth Social post at 2 a.m. is a different matter entirely. But for now, $20 billion in annual content spending has a direct line to the Oval Office — and it's been using it.