{"id":80814,"date":"2025-08-13T23:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T23:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/80814\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T23:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T23:52:09","slug":"what-happened-to-jon-voights-plan-to-save-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/80814\/","title":{"rendered":"What Happened to Jon Voight’s Plan to Save Hollywood?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tJon Voight<\/a> made a splash<\/a> in May when he pitched President Trump<\/a> on a plan to save Hollywood, warning that the industry was at risk of going \u201cdown the drain like Detroit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in the months since then, not much has happened. <\/p>\n

\n\tTrump prompted an outcry when he threatened to tariff foreign-made films, and then quickly moved on.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut conversations are still taking place. Steven Paul and Scott Karol, independent film producers who have worked with Voight to \u201cMake Hollywood Great Again,\u201d are hopeful that a federal film incentive will be introduced in Congress this year.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cJust because we might not see things in the press, doesn\u2019t mean people aren\u2019t working hard behind the scenes,\u201d Paul said in an interview on Wednesday.<\/p>\n

\n\tKarol said the hope is that a federal incentive will be \u201cintroduced in a bipartisan fashion soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHollywood unions have long sought a federal incentive to counteract the tax credits offered by Canada, the U.K. and many other countries that have lured production jobs over the last few decades. The global production downturn that has hit the industry since 2022 has revived those discussions. But while California, New York and Texas have boosted their incentives, nothing has yet emerged on the federal level.<\/p>\n

\n\tRep. Laura Friedman, a Democrat from the Los Angeles area, has said she will back such an incentive. California Sen. Adam Schiff is also working on the idea, though no Republicans have yet publicly signed on, and Trump has not expressed his support.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the meantime, a much more modest initiative has started to take shape on Capitol Hill. Earlier this month, a bipartisan group in the House and Senate introduced<\/a> a bill to extend and expand Section 181, a tax deduction for independent film producers. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe deduction, first passed in 2004, allows investors to write off production costs immediately, rather than waiting for the investment to depreciate over several years.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe deduction is limited to $15 million per production, and is currently set to expire on Dec. 31. Hollywood unions and the Motion Picture Association have called<\/a> on Trump to extend it and to raise the cap to $30 million, or $40 million for productions made in low-income areas. The extension was included in Voight\u2019s draft plan to save Hollywood.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt\u2019s a beginning,\u201d Paul said Wednesday. \u201cYou start somewhere, and it\u2019s a very good beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHollywood stakeholders have also called for reauthorization of Section 461, which allowed companies to carry back their net operating losses for up to five years. That provision, which expired in 2022, was particularly helpful to film companies who have uneven revenue streams, and could use losses in one year to cancel out profits in earlier years.<\/p>\n

\n\tKarol said the idea of a tariff on foreign-made movies has not resurfaced in the conversations he\u2019s been part of. Although, if a federal incentive were in place, it\u2019s conceivable producers might face a penalty for choosing to go overseas.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe president is very behind bringing production back to America and seeing our business healthy,\u201d Paul said. \u201cHe stays committed to that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jon Voight made a splash in May when he pitched President Trump on a plan to save Hollywood,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":80815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[88,56703,968],"class_list":["post-80814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-jon-voight","tag-president-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=80814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/80814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/80815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=80814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=80814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=80814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}