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A law written the year Stalin died is still setting the price Malaysians pay to watch a film or attend a concert. The Entertainment Duty Act 1953 levies a general rate of 25% on admission fees across a broad range of entertainment, from cinema tickets to live performances, and a coalition of 122 business groups now argues that the legislation is actively holding back investment in Malaysia’s creative and tourism economy.
The coalition, calling itself Industries Unite, renewed its push at a press conference in Petaling Jaya on Wednesday, urging both federal and state governments to abolish the Act entirely. The demand is not new, but the scale of the industry frustration behind it is becoming harder to ignore.
More Than 600 Screens Are Overdue for a Renovation
Koh Mei Lee, chairman of the Malaysian Association of Film Exhibitors and a member of Industries Unite, put a concrete number to the problem: more than 600 cinema screens across the country have not undergone any major refurbishment in over a decade. The reason, she said, is straightforward. Operators are still working through the debt accumulated during the Covid-19 pandemic closures, and the entertainment duty eats into the margin that would otherwise fund upgrades.
“If the entertainment tax is removed or reduced, we will prioritise refurbishing and renovating these cinemas to ensure the industry’s long-term sustainability,” Koh told reporters. She framed the investment case plainly: audiences now go to cinemas almost exclusively for large-scale blockbusters, because streaming services offer a cheaper and more convenient alternative for anything less spectacular. “If it is just an average movie or comedy, they don’t go because it is more convenient to watch at home,” she said.
The logic she is making is that the physical cinema experience needs to be genuinely better than the home alternative to justify the trip, and that requires capital. Without relief from the entertainment duty, that capital is not materialising. The result is a slow deterioration of the cinema estate at precisely the moment the industry needs to differentiate itself from Netflix and its competitors.
A Patchwork of State Policies Is Choking Live Events
The problem is not confined to cinemas. Rizal Kamal, senior adviser to the Malaysian Association for Arts, Live Events, Concerts and Festivals, raised a separate but equally damaging issue: because entertainment duty is administered at the state level, event organisers face different tax rates, different approval processes, and different interpretations of the rules depending on which state they operate in.
“We want certainty. We want stable, long-term policy that creates confidence. Confidence attracts investments. Investments create more events, more tourism, stronger local businesses and definitely vibrant cities across Malaysia,” Rizal said. His argument is that policy inconsistency functions as a hidden tax on planning itself, because organisers cannot price events reliably or commit to multi-year investments when the regulatory environment shifts from state to state.
One specific anomaly he highlighted illustrates how the current framework can produce outcomes that nobody intended. If a concert featuring a local Malaysian artist includes even a single foreign act on the bill, the entire event can be reclassified into a higher international-entertainment duty bracket. “So the local artist can’t even have an international performer open for them because the tax would just go up to 10%. Ultimately, the local artist loses out,” Rizal said. The rule, designed presumably to distinguish between local and international productions, ends up penalising collaboration and limiting the commercial appeal of shows built around homegrown talent.
Why Abolition, Not Just Reform, Is the Ask
Industries Unite is not asking for a rate reduction or a temporary exemption. It is asking for the Act to be scrapped. The reasoning is that a 70-year-old piece of legislation, written for a pre-streaming, pre-multiplex, pre-digital economy, cannot be patched into relevance. The categories it uses, the administrative structures it assumes, and the rates it sets all reflect a world that no longer exists.
The coalition’s framing connects the entertainment duty directly to Malaysia’s broader ambitions in tourism and the creative economy. Events and cinemas are not just leisure businesses. They generate hospitality spending, support local suppliers, and contribute to the kind of urban vibrancy that attracts both domestic and international visitors. A tax structure that discourages investment in venues and live events therefore has consequences well beyond the entertainment sector itself.
Whether the federal government moves on this will depend on how it weighs the revenue currently collected under the Act against the investment and economic activity that could be unlocked by removing it. The coalition’s case is that the trade-off favours abolition, and with 122 business groups aligned behind that position, the political cost of continued inaction is rising. The 600 cinema screens waiting for renovation are a visible and measurable symbol of what the current policy is costing.
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