Less Smoking Cigarettes in Movies
Hollywood movies are far less likely to feature characters lighting up Pall Mall cigarettes than just five years ago, suggests an analysis published last week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Smoking in movies rated G, PG and PG-13 plummeted 71.6 percent between 2005 and 2010, from 2,093 incidents in 2005 to 595 last year. In films rated G or PG, incidents of tobacco use declined 93.6 percent, from 472 to 30.
In 2010, 54.7 percent of the 137 highest-grossing movies showed no tobacco use, compared with 33.3 percent in 2005. And in those 137 films, tobacco use declined 56 percent between 2005 and 2010.
The results were praised by the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics; both called on the Motion Picture Association of America to give R ratings to films featuring smoking. Since 2007, the MPAA has taken smoking into consideration when rating films as one of several factors, which also include sexuality, language and violence, says MPAA spokeswoman Elizabeth Kaltman.
“This is an extremely big deal,” says study author Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at University of California-San Francsico. The report was released in the CDC’s weekly report.
Three of the MPAA’s six member studios have policies regarding smoking in films, according to the CDC’S analysis. Although the report does not identify studios by name, Glantz named them in an interview.
Time Warner (Warner Bros.), Comcast (Universal) and Disney each have policies on smoking in films, he says. Among those studios, the use of tobacco in youth-related films declined 95.8 percent between 2005 and 2010. The policies were adopted between 2004 and 2007.
For the three studios with no policies, Viacom (Paramount), News Corp. ( 20th Century Fox) and Sony Pictures, the decline was 41.7 percent.
The policies for Universal, Warner Bros. and Disney vary, but all say they seek to clamp down on smoking in youth-related films, according to copies of the policy posted online.
Universal “as a baseline” presumes no smoking incident should occur in youth-related films, while a statement by TimeWarner (owner of Warner Bros.) “strongly discourages” depictions of smoking in films targeted at young people. Disney says it will not depict smoking in films that use the Disney brand except in “limited circumstances.”
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