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July 2, 2019

Is Yesterday the most smokefree movie in history?

In the new movie Yesterday (Comcast, PG-13), a young man wakes up and realizes that — in his new reality — the Beatles never existed. This gives him some pretty good ideas for some songs he calls his own.

But that's not all that's changed. Here's a spoiler from online movie site Screen Rant:

"One unexpected benefit of the blackout changing the world is that cigarettes never existed ... Jack learns this after a particularly stressful moment in Los Angeles where he asked Rocky for a cigarette and his friend had never heard of such a thing."

A world that has never heard of cigarettes is a change of pace for Comcast's UK-based production company Working Title. Its co-chairs Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner rank among the smokiest film producers of the 21st Century.

Seventy percent of their films have featured smoking since 2002. Together, they've delivered more than seven billion tobacco impressions to domestic moviegoers.

Since 2018, however, all four of Working Title's top-grossing films have been smokefree. Their latest film, Yesterday, is in some ways the most smokefree of all.

Imagine...

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Thanks again to Breathe California's Daneille Driscoll, who tipped us this story. Philip Morris ad image (1951, with a small alteration) from Stanford Research into the Impact of Tobacco Advertising (SRITA).

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