Clearing the air: Disney to ban smoking in all future movies

Disney has banned smoking in all of its forthcoming movies, unless characters being depicted were historically known for lighting up.

The news broke at Disney’s annual shareholder meeting in San Francisco on Thursday, during which the studio also confirmed plans for Frozen 2 and revealed the title of its Star Wars spin-off project, Rogue One. Walt Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger said he would “absolutely prohibit” smoking in all Disney films going forward, including those produced by the studio’s wholly owned comic-book-movie division, Marvel Studios, and Star Wars unit Lucasfilm.

“I thought it was the right thing for us to do,” said Iger, who was responding to a query from an investor. “We are extending our policy to prohibit smoking in movies across the board: Marvel, Lucas, Pixar and Disney films,” he said. “Except when we are depicting a historical figure who may have smoked at the time. For instance, we’ve been doing a movie on Abraham Lincoln, he was a smoker, and we would consider that acceptable.

“But in terms of any new characters that are created for any of those films, under any of those labels, we will absolutely prohibit smoking in any of those films.”

Disney supposedly banned smoking in family films in 2007, two months after US ratings body the Motion Picture Association of America said it would consider the habit when awarding film certificates. The policy does not appear to have been universally enforced, however, with the character of Absolom the caterpillar retaining his trademark hookah in Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland remake from 2010.