Netflix co-ceo lobbied trump to kill 100% foreign-film tariff

Ted Sarandos walked into the Oval Office with a simple message for Donald Trump: slap a 100% tariff on overseas productions and you’ll gut the very platform that keeps American culture on every phone on Earth.

Netflix’s co-CEO told POLITICO he has spent months whispering the same warning in the West Wing—imports like Squid Game and All Quiet on the Western Front are not Trojan horses; they are the bait that pulls 280 million subscribers into the Netflix fly-trap, where three out of every four minutes watched are still made in the USA.

The carrot he dangled

Sarandos offered Trump a domestic expansion playbook instead: more sound stages in Georgia, fatter tax credits in New Jersey, faster permitting in Los Angeles. The pitch is classic Silicon Valley—don’t ban the competition, outrun it. “Tariffs are the wrong instrument,” he said. “Incentives move crews, not walls.”

The White House, ever allergic to public retreat, has not officially shelved the May threat of a century-sized levy on foreign films, but insiders say the idea has cooled. One official admitted the logistics are “a nightmare”—how do you customs-tax a stream of bits?

For Netflix, the math is brutal either way. The company will burn roughly US $20 billion on content this year, and roughly half of its new titles are shot outside U.S. borders. A blanket tariff would not just raise costs; it would ignite retaliatory taxes on American shoots from London to Madrid, collapsing the co-financing model that lets Netflix stretch every dollar into multiple languages.

Hollywood’s hollow backlot

The panic in Los Angeles is real. Production days in L.A. County have fallen 24% since 2019, according to FilmLA, while Georgia’s stages can’t be booked until 2026. London lures crews with a 25% cash rebate, Prague tops 30%, Australia nearly 40%. Trump’s tariff fantasy was meant to claw that work back, but Sarandos argues the cure would kill the patient.

Netflix’s secret weapon is data. When a Korean survival drama captures 1.65 billion hours of watch time in 30 days, the algorithm instantly greenlights Korean-language rom-coms, Korean directors, Korean visual effects houses. The cycle feeds American editors, American marketers, American dubbing studios. Cut the foreign root, and the domestic tree stops bearing fruit.

So far, Sarandos believes he has “convinced” the president—at least enough to keep the tariff pen uncapped. The next test arrives this autumn, when the administration must decide whether to formalize the proposal or let it die quietly in some inter-agency drawer. Until then, Netflix keeps shooting in Cape Town, Mexico City, Madrid, and yes, Atlanta, betting that stories shot anywhere can still sell popcorn everywhere.

If the tariff ever lands, the first casualty won’t be Sarandos’s balance sheet; it will be the thumbnail that hooks a teenager in Iowa on a German time-travel thriller at 2 a.m. Kill that curiosity, and you don’t just tax imports—you tax attention itself.