“A license to kill is also a license not to kill,” says James Bond’s new boss, the mysterious M, in Spectre (2015).
The film’s producers didn’t pay attention. Despite years of warnings from WHO and the CDC, tobacco shows up in the latest Bond film alongside a record twenty-three...
Hollywood's animated characters are smoking less — a lot less.
From 2002 to 2011, Breathe California's Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! data shows that 27 percent of top-grossing animated films featured tobacco. The top three in terms of audience exposure:
#1. Rango (PG, 2011, Viacom) with more than fifty tobacco incidents on screen, delivered 948 million domestic tobacco impressions.
#2. The...
The American Academy of Pediatics just released new Tobacco Prevention Guidelines. Among other things, the guidelines say:
"Advertising and promotion is a cause of tobacco use initiation in adolescents. Therefore, tobacco advertising and promotion that is accessible to children should be prohibited, including point-of-sale advertising, product placements in movies and...
The Thumbs Up! Thumbs Down! movie database, created by Breathe California of Sacramento-Emigrant Trails, contains detailed information on smoking in over 2300 movies released since 2002. Working with your volunteers, Breathe updates the database every week. This information forms the backbone of all the lists and charts on the Smoke Free Movies site.
Now you can search it for yourself. You can access it...
Add Norway to the list of countries where there is strong, consistent evidence that onscreen smoking in movies causes young people to smoke.
Gunnar Sæbo and Ingeborg Lund from the Norwegian Institute for Alcohol and Drug Research, just published their paper, “Exposure to smoking in films and smoking behavior among Norwegian 15- to 20-year olds: A cross-sectional study,” which shows that,...
Ontario, Canada's Coalition on Smoke-Free Movies is hosting a Twitter chat around the Toronto International Film Festival this week. Spread the word! The coalition is pushing adult ratings and anti-tobacco spots before movies with smoking. Just weeks ago, Ontario researchers...
On 8 September, opening day of the Toronto International Film Festival, the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit (OTRU) released a new report detailing the cost in lives and money when US movies with smoking are dumped into Canada’s youth market.
DOWNLOAD: Youth Exposure to Tobacco in Movies in Ontario, Canada: 2004-...
In collaboration with colleagues at the CDC Office on Smoking and Health and at UCSF, we just published “Protobacco Media Exposure and Youth Susceptibility to Smoking Cigarettes, Cigarette Experimentation, and Current Tobacco Use among US Youth,” in PLoS ONE. This paper uses data from the 2012 National Youth Tobacco Survey to concurrently examine the effects of a wide range of media influences...
Since June 30, Comcast released two PG-13 films with smoking: Self/less and Terminator Genesys. This reduces the number of MPAA-member companies with 100% smokefree records for their 2015 youth-rated films from four to three: Disney, Time Warner and Viacom.
It is yet another example of why we need the R rating to protect...
The one Disney film label unnamed in Disney’s policy update is Touchstone, which it uses to release PG-13 films from DreamWorks under a seven-year distribution agreement. Along with that agreement, Disney also maintains a $250 million loan facility for DreamWorks. In effect, then, Disney and DreamWorks enjoy a deal structure very common among the major studios: the...
