The South Korea Ministry of Health and Welfare has found 50 percent or more of Korea's most popular TV dramas, movies and online animated shows feature tobacco imagery, Korea Times reports. The government's survey covered media releases between January 2017 and June 2018.
"Children and adolescents exposed to smoking scenes repeatedly are more likely to try smoking," a ministry official observed. "We...
In a letter sent on April 15, 2019, three U.S. Senators — Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Edward Markey (D-MA), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) — queried thirteen of America's largest media companies on how many of their films and TV shows featured toxic tobacco imagery in the past five years and asked each company to take a position on recommended policies to protect kids' health.
The Senators reminded traditional broadcast and film producers CBS, Comcast, Disney (owns Fox), Lionsgate, Sony, and...
Weeks after Disney completed its buy-out of Fox, Screen Daily reports how Disney will roll out its new Netflix-battling streaming service, Disney+:
...An annual public health survey of top-grossing US movies, released today, reports that most major movie studios have dramatically cut back on smoking in their kid-rated movies in the past two decades. Against the tide, only Comcast’s Universal and Fox (now owned by Disney) are pushing more tobacco imagery proven to recruit kids to smoke.
Breathe California and the University of California, San Francisco, also report that nearly three-quarters of smoking...
It turns out that a company in the UK sells a line of herbal cigarettes “made specifically for movie and theatre production needs.”
No logos, no identifying bands. Just “ultra light tasting all white smokes” that keep actors, directors, producers, and studio executives away from secondhand tobacco smoke and addictive nicotine.
Meanwhile, background actors (extras) smoking or working around these prop cigarettes are “bumped” another $14 a day, according to their SAG-AFTRA...
Disney owes parents and kids an answer | The Walt Disney Company completed its buy-out of Twentieth Century Fox this week. The $71.3 billion deal includes the Fox and Fox Searchlight film labels. Many top Fox film executives crossed over to Disney. And Disney — which has the toughest smokefree policy in Hollywood — also won Fox’s enormous library of movies with smoking.
In 2018 and again in early 2019, socially-responsible investors...
Wednesday, March 20 | Disney completes its acquisition of Fox. Disney plans to launch its own streaming service by the end of 2019. Investors have raised serious concerns about how Disney will market recent Fox films with smoking and asked Disney if it will bring Fox and its Fox Searchlight film label under Disney’s current no-...
On November 5, 2018, Christopher Ferguson and colleagues published ‘Movie Smoking and Teen Smoking Behavior: A Critical Methodological and Meta-Analytic Review” in Psychology of Popular Media Culture. The paper argues that the conclusions of the US Surgeon General and National Cancer...
Green Book is a biopic about the unlikely friendship that develops between Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), a bouncer from the...
On December 17, 2018, Smokefree Movies ran its 128th ad in Variety and Hollywood Reporter reminding the studios and multinational tobacco companies that own them that they have known for 17 years that onscreen smoking hooks kids on tobacco, one third of who die early as a result.
While we have made progress – onscreen smoking is still well below its 2005 peak – but the studios still have not...
