Hooray for Brollywood: the UK’s film industry is booming – for now

Britain’s film and high-end TV industries are enjoying a golden era as American studios flock to the UK – but Donald Trump could be about to spring a plot twist on the British film boom. If the US president follows through on his threat of 100% tariffs on foreign-made movies, the ‘Brollywood’ success story might find itself at risk of an unhappy ending.

‘More Hollywood than Hollywood’

London has become “more Hollywood than Hollywood”, said The Hollywood Reporter, with “state-of-the-art shooting facilities” in and around the UK capital “running at full capacity”. Notably, Marvel has relocated its operations from Atlanta, Georgia to Buckinghamshire’s Pinewood Studios, which is under a long-term lease to Disney. The forthcoming Spider-Man movie, as well as the next two Avengers movies will be filmed there.

The UK’s film and prestige TV production revenue reached £5.6 billion in 2024, a 31% increase from the previous year, of which £4.8 billion came from external investment and co-productions, “demonstrating the UK’s strength as a destination for international filmmaking”, said City AM.

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Crucial to London’s success has been a “competitive and well-developed tax-incentive system” – the UK’s Audio-Visual Expenditure Credit. This provides a tax credit of up to 25.5% on qualifying expenditure, which has “translated into significant cost savings” on large-scale productions for major US-based studios and streamers.

In addition to the tax breaks, the UK has an established and experienced workforce and, crucially, it's also “cheaper” for US production companies, partly because universal healthcare means British studios aren’t required to “subsidise workers’ medical expenses”, said Screen Rant.

Sending shivers

As Brollywood booms, “Tinseltown has lost much of its lustre”, said The Hollywood Reporter. Once the “global hub of film, wealth and glamour”, Los Angeles has “become a casualty of the worldwide production plunge”: the number of US productions was down some 40% in the second quarter of 2024 compared to the same period in 2022, according to a report by industry intelligence platform ProdPro.

President Trump has warned that Hollywood is facing a “very fast death” due to competition from international movie-making hubs including Canada. To address this, he intends to wield his “preferred economic weapon” of tariffs, said The New York Times: a threat that’s sending "a shiver” through Britain’s film industry.

His declaration in May, repeated this week, that he wants to impose 100% levies on films made in “foreign lands”, is “particularly alarming” in Britain, where Hollywood blockbusters are now a “critical part of the industry”. So far, it remains just a threat and it is unclear how he would implement it, but there is still concern that uncertainty around tariffs could “wipe out” the gains made in Britain since the pandemic and the US screenwriters’ strike.

The worry around the possibility of hefty tariffs is “really disempowering” and “destablising”, Marcus Ryder, chief executive of the Film and TV Charity, told the paper. “Even a short-term tariff could have a long-term devastating effect on the work force.”