Despite exponential growth and spread of the entertainment media these days, little is known about
its impact on human health. Among various media entertainment, hit films have the highest
immersion level compared to the rest of the media as it is viewed by thousands or even billions of
people. This research is a meta-analytic study that comprehensively deals with the results of content
analysis on smoking scenes of the movies, especially referring to papers published at PubMed from
1990 to 2010. Areas of research cover sixteen papers that include MeSH keywords and four reports
released by American Lung Association. We made systematic classification on the documents of the
research areas according to analysis period, unit of analysis, inter-rater reliability, and measuring
methods of smoking scenes. It then analyzed their exposure effect such as frequency of smoking
scenes, context of the smoking scenes, characteristics of actors/actresses and health consequences.
According to the result, the number of smoking scenes in the American hit films since 1950s turned
out to be 10.7 per hour in 1950s, which was reduced to 4.9 per hour in 1980s to rise again to 10.9
per hour in 2000s. For movies released after 2000s, smoking scenes accounted for only four percent of
the running time, but smoking scenes in the movies were not declined despite reduced smoking rate
in the US since 1990s. In most of the cases, actors or actresses who appeared smoking in the movies
were portrayed as having highly charming characters and socially desirable personalities. Moreover, there
were many cases of brand appearance in which tobacco brands were exposed as part of indirect
advertisement. Only 3.5 to 7 percent of the hit movies delivered the message that smoking was
harmful to our health. Smoking scenes in the movies are highly likely to be imitated by adolescent,
and when audience experience sincere empathy with the smoking actors or actresses, the context
behind the smoking scenes is also likely to be positively reinforced.