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 all 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 still featured tobacco imagery in 2014. There has been no substantial decline in the percentage of youth-rated films with smoking since 2010.
Films rated G or PG comprise about 20 percent of all top-grossing films. Tobacco presence in these films continued to be very low, less than a single incident per film on average. PG-13 films comprise 45 percent of top-grossing films. On average, there were 19 tobacco incidents per PG-13 film in 2014, near the top of the range observed between 2002 and 2014.
While the share of PG-13 films with any smoking has decreased, tobacco incidents per PG-13 film with smoking have increased. In 2014, the average PG-13 film with smoking included more tobacco incidents than in any year since 2002 — and more than were seen in R-rated films since 2007. As a result, there were as many total tobacco incidents in PG-13 films in 2014 as there were in 2002: more than 1,150.
R-rated films average twice as much smoking as PG-13 films. But audiences for youth-rated films are more than twice as large as for R-rated films, and more youth-rated than R-rated top-grossing films are released each year. As a result, in 2014, PG-13 films accounted for 56 percent of US moviegoers’ tobacco exposure (10.6 billion tobacco impressions) while R-rated films delivered 43 percent (8.3 billion).
From 2010 to 2014, Time Warner’s Warner Bros. film division accounted for 23 percent of the 101 billion tobacco impressions delivered to US moviegoers by youth-rated films, followed by Sony (19%), Viacom’s Paramount (15%), Fox (13%), Disney (8%), and Comcast’s Universal (6%). Independent producer-distributers, who do not belong to the Motion Picture Association of America, accounted for 16 percent of audience exposure, in theaters, from youth-rated films.
Film companies have varied in their performance since the US Surgeon General concluded, in 2012, that on-screen smoking causes children to smoke. At Warner Bros. and Disney, tobacco incidents per PG-13 film plummeted from 2013 to 2014. However, PG-13 rated tobacco content more than doubled — often much more — at the four other MPAA-member studios, all of which claim to discourage smoking in their kid-rated movies. PG-13 smoking also doubled in films from independent companies that have no such policies.
The rise in on-screen tobacco incidents and continuous delivery of billions of tobacco impressions to young moviegoers, despite temporizing gestures by the US film industry, underscores the urgent need to modernize the MPAA’s R-rating to cover all future films with tobacco imagery. This would give all film producers a voluntary, market incentive to make the films that children and adolescents see most smokefree.
The full report is available at http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5d5348rs.