In 2025, the motion picture industry was in for a wild ride. The year kicked off with threats of tariffs on foreign-produced movies, reached an inflection point with a bidding battle between a studio and a streamer for an iconic Hollywood studio, and ended with the dawn of a new wave of piracy threats fueled by artificial intelligence (AI) apps. Charles Rivkin, chairman and CEO of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), joined Boxoffice Pro on the eve of CinemaCon to discuss these topics and more, in what promises to be a busy 2026 for the trade association.
We are at a crossroads in the industry, with news swirling about another potential merger between two major studios. I know that what you can share with us on the matter is limited given your role at the Motion Picture Association, but can you comment on the situation?
It’s a busy time in our industry, but we don’t comment on the business decisions of our member studios.
Moving on to topics we can actually dig into: What are the main areas of focus and priorities for the MPA in 2026?
The film industry is constantly innovating and evolving. But our core priorities for this year stem from the agenda that always animates the MPA—protecting great stories and the people who tell them.
We will keep advocating for policies that open more doors for more film production. We will continue collaborating with law enforcement, legislators, and other key partners worldwide to shut down criminal piracy operators who steal our studios’ content. We will always defend free speech and copyright. We will push measures on trade, taxes, content protection, and more that are designed to spur job creation, empower creators, and build a thriving creative economy.
The fight against piracy has evolved significantly with the emergence of generative AI. How has your approach to antipiracy changed as a result of these changes? What is the scope of the piracy problem now that AI is in the mix?
No matter how technology changes, the MPA’s content protection efforts will always rise to the challenge of countering piracy and use every innovative tool at our disposal to improve and strengthen our core mission to detect, deter, and dismantle criminal perpetrators of piracy.
Our efforts are making a difference: In 2024, our Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) team partnered with Vietnamese authorities to take down FMovies, then the largest distributor of pirated films in the world. Last year, we collaborated with officials in Egypt to put an end to Streameast, then the biggest provider of illicit sports content on the planet, and that operation represented a key milestone in our fast-growing work to counter live sports piracy in the U.S. and in markets across the globe.
That is just a sliver of our daily leadership to combat the scourge of piracy. That work continues every day to ensure audiences can see the latest content where they should: in theaters and on legitimate platforms. Yet in the age of AI, we know that piracy tactics are evolving and so, too, are our strategies to combat them.
Everywhere we look, we’re seeing AI increase the capabilities of nefarious actors, lowering the barriers to entry into the piracy marketplace and allowing individuals with limited expertise to create, package, and distribute illicit content more rapidly.
That’s a significant challenge. But we’re answering it in kind. We’re leveraging AI-enabled tools to strengthen our antipiracy operations and tapping into new technology to identify illegal services, analyze patterns, and process large volumes of data. We’re pairing these advanced tools with the investigative expertise of law enforcement, studios, and other stakeholders to stay coordinated in our efforts to tackle this threat.
An additional layer in this renewed fight against piracy is that your efforts are no longer squarely directed at illegal content distribution; you’re now on the lookout for illegal production, with actors’ likenesses and studio intellectual property seemingly made available for anyone to create and distribute illegally on the internet. How can the industry rein in this complex new web of illicit content creation?
The MPA, our member studios, the theatrical community, and industry partners appreciate the necessity of meeting newfound challenges and potential threats swiftly, strategically, and immediately.
We saw that urgency on full display in the wake of the recent rollout of Seedance 2.0, which engaged in unauthorized use of U.S. copyrighted works on a massive scale. As the MPA stated the day this platform appeared online, by launching this service without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance, the parent company behind Seedance, disregarded well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs.
The MPA made it clear in our cease-and-desist letter: ByteDance and similar operations must halt their infringing activity and respect the intellectual property that serves as the lifeblood of creative industries everywhere.
We’ve heard several times about potential U.S. tariffs on foreign films and productions that shoot outside of the United States. If this becomes a reality, it would mark the most significant punitive government measure to be implemented in our industry in several decades. How have you worked with the current presidential administration to ensure any policies promote the creative community rather than punish it?
The MPA is working closely with the White House and the Trump administration on a goal we all share: improving and growing the production landscape across the United States and generating jobs in every American community.
To that end, we’ve rallied a powerful, dynamic, unprecedented coalition, featuring our member studios, independent studios, industry unions and guilds, and President Trump’s Hollywood ambassadors, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, around tax policies that will actually ramp up American competitiveness. Chief among them is a measure that would supercharge the domestic film and TV industry: a federal film production incentive.
We still have a ton of work to do to move this concept forward. But every day, we’re collaborating with the White House, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and key partners across all 50 states to advance our agenda and strengthen domestic production.
The MPA has been crucial in helping to establish production initiatives throughout the United States. As productions look overseas to more lucrative incentive offers, how can the United States remain competitive in keeping productions within the country?
Let’s be clear: The United States remains the number one production location for our studios. More money is spent on production in this country than the rest of the world combined. We still boast a trade surplus with every market on the planet, and the film industry remains a robust economic engine for American workers, small businesses, and communities.
This topic was the focus of my presentation here at CinemaCon last year. Incentives are a critical tool for bolstering America as a destination for production, spurring growth in local markets, creating jobs, and driving economic activity. That’s why nearly 40 states have programs on their books right now, and thanks to our advocacy, states from California to New Jersey to New York and beyond all improved their incentives last year, which is already yielding more productions.
But the MPA is focused on bold, far-reaching action at the federal level also, and we are collaborating with a broad cross section of partners to push tax incentives and other measures to encourage domestic investments by our studios and put more people to work bringing great stories to life.
Share this post