Canada’s entertainment industry grapples with keeping elbows up as Hollywood remains a superpower

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Can Canada’s cultural industries go elbows-up while also keeping their arms open?

In a market as small and physically dispersed as Canada, where neither financing nor funding are in great supply, international collaboration – most often with the United States – has long been the name of the game.

Whether you’re a TV producer trying to get a show made, or a commercial theatre producer trying to develop a musical, or a museum looking to put together a major exhibition, our neighbour to the south has often been the first place to look for partners and collaborators and investment.

Seven charts that show the state of arts funding across Canada

The dilemma of the current times, then, is weighing how much to keep working with Americans and their institutions despite deepening political unrest and cross-border acrimony – and how much to focus on reinforcing or building new bridges to the rest of the world.

In film and television, Canadians haven’t stopped looking stateside despite President Donald Trump’s confusing posts about film tariffs and calls to fire satirical television hosts, according to Reynolds Mastin, president and CEO of the Canadian Media Producers Association.

“Hollywood remains the entertainment superpower of the world and so it is impossible to ignore and ... I think all of my producer members would agree it would be crazy to ignore it,” says Mastin.

At the same time, however, the CMPA has actively been ramping up its trade missions to other countries – sending troops of Canadian producers to film festivals and content markets in London, Berlin, Copenhagen, and cities in France, South Africa and South Korea in the past year alone.

With rising costs affecting screen production everywhere, there seems to be increased international interest in co-producing with Canadians, too. The CMPA is expected to host 10 international delegations at its next Prime Time conference in 2026. “Five years ago, even having a single international delegation at Prime Time was considered a special thing,” says Mastin.

Canadian television and film producers Alfons and Amos Adetuyi – frequent collaborators who founded Inner City Films and Circle Blue Entertainment, respectively – are among those increasingly forming partnerships outside the United States, for a number of reasons.

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The brothers used to be in the U.S. for work, but in the past year they’ve been more often farther abroad - signing a co-production deal with Luxembourg, a casting deal in Britain. “Our trips now tend to be European more than anything; I think we could see the writing on the wall,” says Amos, who says parts of the U.S. industry have been grinding to a halt owing to uncertainty related to tariffs.

Then, there’s the way that politics are influencing what American studios and broadcasters are willing to partner on – amid an anti-woke crusade in which “DEI” can mean anything.

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Amos Adetuyi tells a story about how the brothers recently pitched a half-hour comedy in the U.S. adapted from a British show. “We were going to change up one of the characters to be non-binary – but then it became very clear to us that, well, we can’t pitch that to any American broadcasters,” says Amos.

In a meeting with one broadcaster down in LA, Amos says, he was told that they were shifting to shows and series with a “Midwest” appeal. “As far as diversity and things like that, that’s falling off the table in the U.S.,” he says.

The Apprentice producer Daniel Bekerman knows first hand about the cultural chill sweeping through the U.S. after his movie about the young Donald Trump – a co-production between Canada, Denmark, Ireland the U.S. – came under attack by Trump on social media last year. “We experienced the way threats from Donald Trump, which he made against our movie, affected the market reaction and the willingness of the largest entertainment companies to engage or take any risk of getting on the wrong side of his temper,” he says.

“The behaviour after the threats to Jimmy Kimmel was extremely familiar,” he adds.

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But Bekerman also noted how quickly ABC changed course under market pressure – and says his own experiences with The Apprentice haven’t stopped him from wanting to work across the border. “We can’t say Americans are bad and Canadian are good; we have to be open to stories from anywhere, we have to be open to collaborators from anywhere,” he says.

In the musical theatre world, Come From Away is Canada’s biggest commercial success story to date – but it only became one because a lot of Americans took a chance on the Canadian creation.

Michael Rubinoff, who was the originating producer, took the show down to New York for a showcase, where producers Junkyard Dogs got behind it and shepherded its development across U.S. regional theatres on its way to becoming a Broadway hit.

Rubinoff, recently appointed the artistic director of Musical Stage Company in Toronto, expected to take a new project called Maggie: The Musical on a similar trajectory - bringing it down to Goodspeed Musicals in Connecticut in 2024.

Now, however, Rubinoff is looking overseas to continue the development of the Canadian musical set in Scotland and eyeing the West End over Broadway.

“The winds have shifted politically since the run [in Connecticut],” Rubinoff says. “One of the places that we’re looking at engaging with a lot more is the U.K. There’s more of an alignment on certain values and our storytelling.”

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Part of that move, too, is about simple economics: It has become even more expensive to produce on Broadway since the pandemic. “The economics are more measured in the U.K. and they have a national theatre tax credit that helps with the development,” says Rubinoff, who also recently visited South Korea, where the government has set up a K-Musical department to complement those that have made K-Pop and K-Television global phenomena.

In the not-for-profit sector, Why Not Theatre, a Toronto-based theatre company, had a major breakthrough on American stages recently when its acclaimed two-part epic Mahabharata was programmed by the Lincoln Centre in New York.

Between that show being announced and being presented, however, Trump was re-elected – and bringing an international team of 40 cast and crew to New York became more complicated, says Ravi Jain, Why Not’s founder and co-artistic director. The individuals involved held Canadian, Australian, Malaysian, Indian and British passports; one cast member was non-binary – and others were born in Iran.

Both Why Not and the Lincoln Centre had lawyers on retainer in case there was trouble at the border – and everyone’s flights were routed through Pearson Airport in Toronto, so if anyone was denied entry, they could be released instead of detained.

Despite the extra costs on an already expensive tour to New York, Jain is already planning a trip back with his company’s collaboration with David Suzuki, What You Won’t Do For Love.

While Trump has directly taken control of the Kennedy Center in Washington, other American arts organization still program based on their own values, which don’t necessarily align with the President’s. “There’s actually a lot of demand for what we have to say, the perspectives we’re bringing, particularly a show about climate, the nuances of a Canadian identity,” he says. “There’s just more appetite and desire for people to engage in our perspective.”