September 28, 2012   Depictions of smoking in top-grossing,  youth-rated movies increased in 2011, reversing a five-year decline, a new report shows. The finding comes just a few months after the U.S. Surgeon General’s office warned that seeing smoking in movies causes young people to start smoking. The report found that four of the six major Hollywood studios featured more smoking in their youth-rated (G, PG and PG-13) movies in 2011. Compared to 2010, the number of depictions of smoking per youth-rated movie increased by more than one-third.

The sharpest increase in the number of tobacco depictions per youth-rated movie were in films from the three major studies with published policies addressing onscreen smoking: Disney, Universal and Warner Brothers. The number of top-grossing, youth-rated movies that were tobacco-free fell 17 percent over one year among companies with policies, while tobacco depictions in their movies rose from an average of one per movie in 2010 to 8.5 per movie in 2011. Across the movie industry, youth-rated movies accounted for 68 percent of all tobacco depictions seen by audiences in 2011, compared with 39 percent in 2010, according to the report published Sept. 27 in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention journal Preventing Chronic Disease.

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http://health.usnews.com/health-news/news/articles/2012/09/27/smoking-scenes-on-rise-in-top-grossing-youth-rated-movies-cdc