Markets
Squid Game Season 2
(Apu Gomes/Getty Images)

Netflix, Disney, and other media giants slide as Trump claims he’ll slap 100% tariff on foreign-made films

The president says the move will save the US film industry from a “very fast death.”

Shares of Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount dipped Monday morning after President Trump posted on Truth that he was imposing a 100% tariff on all films produced abroad and imported into the US.

The White House framed the move as a drastic but necessary step to revive domestic production, which has increasingly shifted overseas to take advantage of foreign tax incentives. Even recent blockbusters like “Wicked” were filmed in the UK, not California.

The US remains the world’s largest film producer, followed by the UK and China, accoring to The-Numbers.com. But even in California, home of Hollywood, productions have steadily drifted abroad, lured by deeper tax breaks and lower costs. Industry groups have pressed Governor Gavin Newsom to step up local incentives. Last fall, the governor proposed expanding California’s Film & Television Tax Credit program from the current $330 million annual allocation to $750 million annually.

The industry is already under pressure: Disney, which made up a quarter of domestic box office sales in 2024, has already had a tough start to the year. “Captain America: Brave New World” pulled in an impressive $414 million, but that’s still a far cry from Marvel’s billion-dollar highs. March’s “Snow White” live-action release only deepened the slump. Meanwhile, Netflix could be hit the hardest: last year, the No. 1 streaming company allocated over half of its $15.5 billion content budget (about $8 billion) toward international productions.

At the same time, other countries are stepping up. Governments from Europe to Australia have expanded credits and cash rebates to attract production and capture a greater share of the $248 billion that's projected to be spent globally on content this year. Experts say tariffs aren’t likely to stop that trend and if the goal is to bring production stateside, tax credits, not trade barriers, could be a more effective tool.

Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount are set to report earnings this week.

More Markets

See all Markets
markets

Report: US senators plan to introduce bill blocking Nvidia from selling advanced chips to China for 30 months

US senators are on the verge of introducing a bill that would block Nvidia from selling its H200 or Blackwell chips to China for 30 months, the Financial Times reports. The H200 is Nvidia’s best chip from the Hopper generation, while the Blackwell line is its current flagship offering.

Shares of the chip designer are little changed in the wake of this report, still up more than 1% on the session. The reaction makes sense, seeing as previous positive indications on Nvidia’s ability to sell advanced chips to China failed to inspire much positive momentum in its shares.

The stock got a short-lived jolt higher (that didn’t last the day!) on November 21 after Bloomberg reported that the Trump administration had discussed the possibility of selling its H200 chips to China.

Nvidia has effectively been shut out of China’s AI market in 2025. First, export restrictions meant it could no longer sell the H20, a nerfed version of its Hopper chip, to the world’s second-largest economy. After that export ban was lifted, demand from China “never materialized,” per Nvidia CFO Colette Kress. Reports indicate that China banned its leading technology giants from purchasing these semiconductors, instead pushing them toward domestic alternatives.

President Donald Trump had mused about allowing Nvidia to sell Blackwell chips to China prior to his meeting with Chinese President Xi in late October, but failed to do so. The two leaders did not discuss the topic at that time.

Per the FT, this upcoming bill would be a bipartisan effort, being cosponsored by the leading Republican and Democrat members of the Senate Foreign Relations East Asia subcommittee.

markets

AI energy plays soar on an explosion of call buying

Like their quantum computing counterparts, AI-linked energy plays are benefiting from an explosion of bullish options activity on Thursday.

  • Oklo is up double digits with call volumes above 106,000 as of 2:46 p.m. ET, more than double its 20-day average for a full session, with a put/call ratio of about 0.6. Call options with a strike price of $110 that expire this Friday (which are now in-the-money thanks to today’s surge) are seeing the most activity.

  • Nuscale, another nuclear energy play, has seen nearly 140,000 call options change hands versus a 20-day average of 51,073.

  • And fuel cell company Bloom Energy has traded nearly 80,000 calls, roughly twice its 20-day average, with a put/call ratio of about 0.3.

During his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast released on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked up the potential for nuclear energy, saying, “In the next six to seven years I think you are going to see a whole bunch of small nuclear reactors.”

This adds to the evidence that the speculative bid is back in a big way after smaller stocks tied to the AI boom and quantum computing cratered from mid-October through most of November as credit risk began to seep into the AI trade.

Old electronic items tossed on ground for disposal, Hudson

Technology giants don’t look like they used to, as the asset-light era fades

Oracle and Meta are now some of the most capital-intensive businesses in the S&P 500, spending more than energy giants. I guess data really is the new oil?

markets

Space stocks rip amid speculation on Altman joining race

Space stocks AST SpaceMobile, Planet Labs, and Rocket Lab all soared Thursday amid a recovery in the high-beta momentum class of shares coveted by some retail traders.

(High-beta momo stocks are basically shares that have been on a winning streak for a while, and tend to go up a lot more than the overall market on positive days. Goldman Sachs includes all three of the aforementioned space stocks in its themed basket of such shares.)

There’s little other fundamental news out there on the companies themselves.

But a Wall Street Journal report that OpenAI impresario Sam Altman has been toying with the idea of entering the space industry, potentially standing up a rival to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite service, may also be contributing.

As we’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes these stocks seem to trade on a what’s-bad-for-the-Musk-empire-is-good-for-us-and-vice-versa vibe.

Latest Stories

Sherwood Media, LLC produces fresh and unique perspectives on topical financial news and is a fully owned subsidiary of Robinhood Markets, Inc., and any views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of any other Robinhood affiliate, including Robinhood Markets, Inc., Robinhood Financial LLC, Robinhood Securities, LLC, Robinhood Crypto, LLC, or Robinhood Money, LLC.