The MPAA just announced that Hail, Caesar! — the new Coen Bros. film opening Friday, 5 February 2016 — has been rated “PG-13 for some suggestive content and smoking."
The film is distributed by Universal Pictures (Comcast).
The MPAA began adding “smoking” descriptors – small-print labels – to its ratings of a small fraction of wide-release movies with tobacco imagery in 2007.
Through 2014, 88 percent of top-grossing, youth-rated films with smoking did not carry a “smoking” label, including three-quarters of all the PG-13 films with more then fifty tobacco incidents each.
In 2014, a UCSF-Breathe California analysis of the MPAA’s descriptors concluded:
"The device of labeling one out-of eight youth-rated films with smoking may lead the public to believe mistakenly that it can rely on MPAA’s ratings to inform parents about the presence of and risk from smoking on screen. In contrast, the 2014 Surgeon General report stated that an R rating for smoking would reduce youth smoking by 18 percent."
The Coen Bros. have eight top-grossing film credits since 2003. Five have been youth-rated. All have included tobacco imagery: more than 700 tobacco incidents delivering 5.4 billion tobacco impressions to domestic moviegoers of all ages.