Goodbye Cigarettes, Hello Blockbusters!

A correlation, not a conclusion

What you are looking at is the trajectory of Tobacco Production set against US Movie Theater Screens. Over the years where both series exist, they happen to move inversely tightly enough to produce r ≈ 87% (negative). That number sounds impressive. It is also entirely meaningless without a hypothesis.

Two unrelated trends can correlate strongly when they share an underlying driver — economic growth, technology adoption, demographic change — or when the dataset is small enough for noise to look like a signal. The only thing this chart proves is that "correlation does not imply causation" remains the most-ignored sentence in science.

Treat it as a meme with a citation. Source data is from public, reputable datasets; the implied story is not.