Trump always hated foreign movies - I remember him disparaging an Academy award winning movie purely because it was non-English language. Wonder what prompted this outburst - the success of Ne Zha 2 (china bad), or No Other Land (can't say Palestine)?
This proclamation and his desire to reopen Alcatraz may be linked to the fact that PBS in Palm Beach aired "Escape from Alcatraz" last night. Presumably the tariffs on foreign movies came from his annoyance at channel surfing.
It's something that I think has been bubbling up for a while. I've heard a lot of complaints from people in and around the industry, and the complaints are a lot less about Ne Zha 2 and more about stuff that used to be filmed in Hollywood being filmed in Canada instead for cost purposes.
Cool, whatever organic market activities need to take place to make products cheaper is ok by the real gods of sacred capitalism. Trump is acting more and more like an irrational communist dictator each day.
I had never heard of Ne Zha 2, but a quick search shows that it only had a limited release in the US and made a tiny $20 million at the box office. Unlikely that Trump is making decisions based on that.