SmokeScreeners

2011 "Phlegmmy Awards"

In conjunction with the annual Academy Awards, The SmokeScreeners have issued their annual “Phlegmmy Awards”, the list of the ten films with most tobacco use as rated by students, parents, and educators. Rango tops this year’s list as the Worst Movie of 2011.

“Rango is a PG-rated, animated film that showed eight different characters smoking in 27 different scenes,” said Dr. Barry Hummel, a Pediatrician and youth tobacco prevention advocate. “While the film, a throw-back to classic westerns, may have been intended for adult audiences, its PG-rating and association with Nickelodeon Movies certainly drew large numbers of families with younger children to the theater. Given all we know about the impact of scenes of movie smoking on the initiation of youth tobacco use, Nickelodeon certainly tarnished its brand by allowing this level of smoking into a PG-rated film.”

Dr. Hummel also pointed out the importance of such tobacco use in movies. “Rango has sold over $123 million in tickets in the United States alone. If we assume the average ticket price is $8.00, then over 15 million Americans have seen the movie. That means the 27 smoking scenes in Rango have provided 405 million tobacco impressions… not bad marketing for an industry that has few remaining advertising options. This use of tobacco by movie characters continues to glamorize... and normalize... tobacco use, especially among our youth.”

The SmokeScreeners program was developed by Dr. Hummel as a way of highlighting the problem of tobacco use in films marketed to children and teenagers. “Even if you exclude product placement, smoking by actors in movies is a form of subliminal advertising for the tobacco industry,” says Dr. Hummel. “The sad reality is that somewhere between one-third to one-half of all teenagers who smoke say that they lit their first cigarettes because it looked cool in a movie. Here, we also have a movie glorifying cigar smoking, a growing tobacco problem among middle and high school students in the United States.”

The entire Top Ten Phlegmmy Awards List for 2011 includes:

1. Rango (PG)

2. Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (PG-13)

3. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (PG-13)

4. The Help (PG-13)

5. Super 8 (PG-13)

6. Cowboys & Aliens (PG-13)

7. Hugo (PG)

8. Moneyball (PG-13)

9. Water for Elephants (PG-13)

10. Midnight in Paris (PG-13)

The films are rated using a standardized score sheet which takes into account the importance of the cast members seen smoking, the amount of smoking, the location of the smoking, and the perceived message of the smoking scenes. The worst ten films are then selected using a formula that takes into account the film’s smoking score, the MPAA rating, and film’s ticket sales.