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I don't know if you noticed, but The Thing, a longtime cigar smoker in Marvel Comics, does not light up in The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In fact, you'd have to go all the way back to 2009's The Incredible Hulk and 2008's Iron Man to see anyone puffing a cigar in a PG-13 movie in the MCU. That's because Disney, which owns Marvel Studios, has a policy that "actively limits the depiction of smoking in movies marketed to youth," such as in a PG-13 movie (or equivalent show).  

The co-creator of the MCU's Wonder Man show, Andrew Guest, discovered the limits of this policy when he and co-creator Destin Daniel Cretton secured footage from the iconic film, Midnight Cowboy, that appeared in scenes of the show. To jog your memory, Midnight Cowboy, which was made in 1969, features a helluva lot of smoking. 

"You know the hardest part about that? The cigarette smoking. We used real clips from Midnight Cowboy, and initially there was cigarette smoke at the bar and we had to comb through that movie. Everyone is smoking all the time and we couldn’t show any character smoking. That’s not easy to do," Andrew Guest said in an interview with Indiewire. 

From this, we can make a few conclusions. Firstly, it's not a surprise that The Thing doesn't smoke cigars in The Fantastic Four: First Steps, because of the policy that Disney has. And to be clear, while The Thing has smoked in Marvel Comics, the publisher has not featured major characters smoking in mainline Marvel books (meaning, all books that aren't mature-rated) since the start of the 21st century. 

What we can infer from Disney's policy is that we can't expect to see Wolverine show up in a PG-13 Marvel Studios X-Men film with a cigar in hand. You might be wondering, 'Hey, but didn't Wolvie puff a cigar before dropping the F-bomb in X-Men: First Class?' And yes, you'd be correct. But X-Men: First Class was a film produced and distributed by the now-defunct studio, 20th Century Fox, which previously had the movie rights to the X-Men. Likewise, neither the 2008 Iron Man nor the 2009 The Incredible Hulk films were distributed by Disney, so it's not surprising that they're the only PG-13 Marvel Studios films that have smoking in them. 

In fact, there is only one Marvel Studios film distributed by Disney that has a character light up a death stick, and that would be 2024's Deadpool & Wolverine - which is rated R, shockingly. Unless the MCU's future X-Men movie is going to be rated R (in which case, it better be adapting Uncanny X-Force by Rick Remender, Jerome Opeña, Billy Tan, and more. ALL OF IT.), it looks like Wolverine isn't going to be stinking up the X-Mansion with his vices in a kid-friendly movie any time soon. 

To me, my X-Men fans. Want more about Marvel's mutants? You don't need Cerebro to find what you should read next... we made a list!

• The best X-Men comics
• Every Omega-Level X-Men mutant ranked by power
• How to read the Marvel Comics' X-Men in order following the Krakoa era
• Why the Krakoan Age of X-Men was ended by Marvel
• How to watch the X-Men movies in order