The Cigarette in Film Today: Why Smoking on Screen Is Making a Comeback—and What It Means
After decades of decline, smoking imagery in film and television is rebounding—driven by streaming platforms, period pieces, and auteur directors who use the cigarette as a narrative tool. The public health response has been largely ineffectual.
The MPAA's 2007 announcement that smoking would be considered a factor in film ratings was supposed to reduce smoking imagery in movies—and for a while, it did. Smoking incidents in top-grossing films declined by approximately 50% between 2005 and 2015. The decline was celebrated by public health advocates as evidence that the film industry was finally taking smoking seriously. **But the trend has reversed. Streaming platforms, which operate outside the MPAA rating system, have no restrictions on smoking imagery. Period pieces—Mad Men, Peaky Blinders, The Crown—use the cigarette as an essential period detail, saturating their visuals with smoking. And auteur directors continue to deploy the cigarette as a narrative tool—the solitary smoker, the contemplative drag, the shared cigarette between lovers. The cigarette on screen is making a comeback—and the public health response has been largely ineffectual.**
**The streaming dimension is the most significant driver of the revival.** Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and the other streaming platforms are not signatories to the MPAA agreement, and their content is not rated by the MPAA. The platforms have their own content guidelines, but smoking imagery is not systematically restricted. The result is that a significant proportion of the most-watched content among young audiences—Netflix original series, YouTube content, TikTok videos—contains smoking imagery that would trigger an R rating in a theatrical release but that reaches adolescent audiences without restriction on streaming platforms. **The regulatory framework that reduced smoking in theatrical films has been outflanked by the platforms that now dominate content consumption—and the public health community has not adapted.**
**The artistic-defense argument is real and cannot be dismissed.** The cigarette is a narratively powerful object—it communicates character, mood, and period with an efficiency that few other props can match. The filmmaker who uses a cigarette to establish a character's world-weariness or a scene's intimacy is making an artistic decision that has genuine narrative value. **The public health argument that smoking imagery should be restricted runs up against the artistic argument that the cigarette is a legitimate narrative tool—and the tension between these arguments is not resolvable by simply declaring that public health should always prevail.**
**💬 When you see smoking in a film or TV show, does it affect you—does it make smoking look appealing, or is it just part of the visual landscape? Should streaming platforms restrict smoking imagery the way theatrical releases do?**
