Health. Smoking scenes in movies: a strong impact on young people

19 minutes of on-screen smoking in Asteroid City, 14 minutes in Anora, 11 minutes in L'Amour ouf: Alliance Against Tobacco denounces the constant presence of cigarettes in films, television series and music videos.

At Cannes 2025, the Palme d'Or for Best Investment goes to tobacco , the association believes. It is launching a shocking campaign, the other French cinema award, which it has titled "The Festival Where You Can," to open our eyes to this trivialization of smoking on screen.

Because among young people, this strategy is a hit: it makes them want to smoke or start smoking/vaping.

The 7th art under influence

It's no coincidence that cigarettes have become so popular in cinema. As early as the 1970s, Philip Morris acknowledged that " the majority of positive images of cigarettes and tobacco [were] created by cinema and television ."

The tobacco industry has used product placement agencies to promote cigarettes on the big screen, as research has shown. One might have thought that restrictive policies (tax increases, advertising bans, etc.) would have curbed this phenomenon.

This is not the case. Tobacco promotion practices, although illegal today, have not disappeared; they have simply left the official contractual framework.

Result: while tobacco consumption is declining among the population, cigarettes remain omnipresent on screen.

ACT has done the math: some films go well beyond that: Anora has the equivalent of 28 spots, L'Amour ouf has a total of 22. Between 2015 and 2019, more than 90% of French films included at least one scene, object or dialogue related to tobacco.

Despite evidence linking on-screen tobacco exposure to smoking among younger people, streaming platforms continue to broadcast and produce series that feature cigarettes.

Those popular with young people are no exception: 53% contain scenes of smoking, representing massive exposure for more than 25 million teenagers. A prime example: Season 2 of Stranger Things contains more than 260 scenes featuring smoking.

In the fourth season of Formula 1: Drive to Survive, each viewer was exposed to over 34 minutes of tobacco-related content. Overall, in less than 10 years, on-screen smoking has quadrupled in youth series.

Music follows the same trend. The share of music videos featuring tobacco doubled between 2021 and 2022.

In the music video for Die with a Smile (Bruno Mars and Lady Gaga, 2025), currently second on YouTube with over a billion views, the singer smokes for almost half the video.

Some pop icons openly glamorize cigarettes: Rosalia gave Charli XCX a bouquet of cigarettes for her birthday; Addison Rae smokes two cigarettes at once in her music video for "Aquamarine" (2025).

Smoking in movies doubles the risk of starting to smoke

The tobacco industry is in the spotlight, and this overexposure has consequences . According to a survey conducted by the Alliance Against Tobacco, 48% of 15- to 25-year-olds say that seeing tobacco on screen pushes them to smoke.

Smoking in movies doubles the risk of starting to smoke. And triples the risk of starting to vape.

Two-thirds of 15- to 25-year-olds believe that films and TV series promote smoking. 72% of ex-smokers say that these scenes revive their desire to smoke.

" Through this campaign – The Festival Where You Can, the first festival to recognize the tobacco industry's presence in films – we want to raise collective awareness and remind people that smoking on screen is not a trivial issue: it is the result of deliberate marketing strategies implemented by the tobacco industry ," says Marion Catellin, director of the Alliance Against Tobacco.

For more information: Truth Initiative, “Lights, Camera, Tobacco? ” (March 2024)