'A kick in the teeth' Tariff threat hangs over British film industry

Tariff threat hangs over British film industry

- Jasper Jolly

It is a sunny May afternoon in Surrey and Richard St Clair is carefully preparing a bomb. It is not real, but it will look like it is when shown on a Netflix TV show. Across the workshop a colleague is cheerfully sandpapering a pile of hip bones for the 28 Years Later zombie trilogy - trailers suggest a lot of skeletons will be involved.

They are working at db Props, a small company based at Shepperton Studios whose handiwork - made of expanding foam, wood or assorted bits and bobs - in films and shows has ranged from weapons in Ant Man to Thor's hammer to Alan Turing's computer in The Imitation Game. Yet for all its work on huge productions, the workshop has a shadow hanging over it, cast by Donald Trump. The US president sent shockwaves through the global film industry with a surprise statement that he will bring in a 100% tariff on movies "produced in Foreign Lands". "WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!" he wrote on his social network.

Dean Brooks, the owner of db Props, said: "I'm terrified about this new Trump thing - whatever that may be. This has been a proper kick in the teeth."

Britain's film and video production industry employs about 99,000 people, but it punches well above the UK's economic weight globally, and has a glamour that other industries cannot match. Hollywood relies heavily on Britain to make its films and big-budget TV series such as the recent Star Wars series Andor and Tom Cruise's Mission Impossible franchise. In turn the UK relies on Hollywood for work: inward investment and co-production spending on film and high-end television in the UK reached £4.8bn in 2024, representing 86% of the total, according to the British Film Institute.