Objectives: While cinema is regarded in the contemporary popular leisure activities, the presentation smoking scenes in filmshas not been fully studied. We investigated Korean box-office hit movies by using content analysis. Methods: We sampledfifty-one hit films played in Korean cinemas during the period 2000-2013. Here, a hit film is defined as a movie viewed byat least 5,000,000 audiences. Results: We found that 78.1% of the Korean hit films contained smoking scenes, whereas only15.6% of the American hit films were so. Films with the more frequent number of smoking scenes could be lined up in theorder of crime, thriller, and action genres (pqqqlt;.05). Smoking actors were leading roles, hence attractive characters appealingto the audience. Moreover, the smoking rate of female characters in the films was determined to be 3.66 times greater thanthe actual smoking rate of females in reality. Conclusions: Smoking scenes are likely to affect the audiences’ cognitive primingand/or social learning with respect to smoking. Therefore, it would be necessary to set a restriction standard to the frequencyof smoking scenes to appear Korean films, and to consider it as an important factor in the assigning a screening grade tosuch films