Kid-rated movies from four major studios — Disney, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. — were 100 percent smokefree in the first half of 2015, a record number of companies.
Smoking was down, but not out, at the two other MPAA member studios, Fox and Sony.
Overall, 28 percent of G, PG and PG-13 films featured tobacco imagery January through June, 2015, compared to 38 percent in the same period the year before. The average number of tobacco incidents in youth-rated films...
On June 29, 2015, The Walt Disney Company released its updated policy on smoking in youth-rated movies, promised by CEO Robert Iger at the company’s annual meeting.
At that March 12 meeting, a shareholder asked Mr. Iger if Disney would “commit to an iron-clad policy that your PG-13 and youth-rated movies never show smoking.” Mr. Iger responded:
...Mad Men’s Betty Hofstadt may be one of only four screen characters in more than a decade to suffer serious harm from smoking. The others were on the big screen: Constantine (Keanu Reeves) in Constantine, Tim Donohue (Donald Sumpter) in The Constant Gardener, and Otis Blake (Jeff Bridges) in Crazy Heart.
Four thousand different characters have smoked in 1,100 top-grossing movies since 2002. If only three of these film characters were...
The CDC just released its annual update of its fact sheet on studio performance on smoking in movies; you can read it at http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/youth_data/movies....
Here is their overview:
Opening this week in the US, When Marnie Was There (PG rated for "thematic elements and smoking") is an animated feature financed by Japan advertising giant Dentsu, the agency for Japan Tobacco.
The film is distributed in the US by Gkids, an independent that releases films from Studio Ghibli, a renowned animation company in Tokyo. Gkids founded and produces New York’s annual International Children’s Film Festival. 2015 festival sponsors include the Academy of Motion...
This week a new comedy staring James Marsden and Jack Black opened. The review of the movie in the San Francisco Chronicle included a still from the movie clearly showing Marsden smoking a cigarette (top photo) but the ads for the movie and its official website show...
Our next Smokefree Movies ad that is running May 6 in The Hollywood Reporter and May 12 in Variety lists some of the most bankable names in Hollywood, along with prominent producers and directors, who are responsible for the most smoking in movies.
You can see the ad on the new Smokefree Movies web site here.
Go to ...
On April 22, 2015, Vivek H. Murthy took the oath of office to serve as US Surgeon General for the next four years. His wide-ranging speech dealt with several aspects of tobacco control, including announcing that, “I want 100% tobacco-free campuses at every college and university in America. We’re already one-quarter of the way there. We in the federal government should lead by example, making our federal campuses – and over one million units of public housing – tobacco-free, too.”...
Jonathan R. Polansky, Kori Titus, Renata Atayeva, and I just released our analysis of smoking in 2014 films. The full report is available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d5348rs.
SUMMARY of FINDINGS
From 2002 to 2014, the share of youth-rated (G/PG/PG-13) films with tobacco imagery fell by nearly half, from 68% to 36%. However, almost half of PG-13 films...
In mid-June, Time Warner (who owns Warner Bros) will become the first major movie studio to hold a shareholder vote on a Smoke Free
Movies proposal. As soon as Time Warner’s proxy ballot is released in late April, every share of stock in the company becomes one vote. At Time Warner’s annual meeting of shareholders in mid-June, there will be a presentation about the proposal, and the company will announce preliminary vote totals. This historic vote comes in the wake of Disney’s...
