Hollywood Gets Young Adult Cancer Wrong, New Study of 20 Films Finds

Hollywood has long had a love affair with cancer stories, but a new analysis suggests the silver screen version of the disease bears little resemblance to what young patients actually live through. In a study published in Supportive Care in Cancer, researchers at Rutgers Cancer Institute systematically analyzed 20 movies released between 2013 and 2023 that center on a character diagnosed with cancer between the ages of 15 and 39, the official adolescent and young adult, or AYA, age range. Their conclusion is stark: popular films depicting AYA cancer are mostly not reflective of the real cancer experience, particularly when it comes to treatment and survival.

The stakes of this mismatch are higher than they might appear. Roughly one in three adolescent and young adult cancer survivors experiences psychological distress, including elevated depression and anxiety, even after treatment ends. Young patients face a uniquely difficult collision between a cancer diagnosis and the developmental tasks of emerging adulthood, such as building careers, relationships, and independence. Unwanted changes in peer relationships are a key component of that distress. Approximately two-thirds of AYA survivors report receiving either negative support, such as having their experiences trivialized or invalidated, or no support at all, such as friends withdrawing from the relationship. Many respond by limiting or withholding cancer-related feelings, which can spiral into loneliness and isolation, both of which are positively associated with increased stress, depression, and anxiety.

The problem runs in both directions. Healthy friends of young patients frequently avoid offering support because they feel uncomfortable and lack confidence in their ability to help, a perceived lack of self-efficacy that likely stems from their age and limited experience with cancer and the healthcare system. If friends judge their earlier attempts at support to have been ineffective, their willingness to try again may diminish, compounding strains within the relationship. This is where movies enter the picture. Prior research has shown that young adult survivors start cancer-related conversations with friends through entertainment media narratives, and shared media consumption is already woven into the social fabric of this life stage. For many young people, on-screen depictions of cancer are the only exposure they have to the disease before a diagnosis, making films a natural entry point into a topic that is rare and uncomfortable for most.

To understand exactly what viewers are seeing, the research team, led by Meredith K. Reffner Collins of Rutgers Cancer Institute, conducted a quantitative and thematic content analysis. They cast a wide net, initially identifying more than 700 potentially relevant titles through prior studies, a cancer tag on the movie website BestSimilar, and Google searches. After removing 597 ineligible titles based on release date, genre, character age, and setting, they used iTunes and Amazon Prime recommendation engines to surface five additional candidates, taking care to sign out of personal accounts, reset internet activity between sessions, and use private browsing to prevent personalization from skewing the results. The final sample comprised 20 films with run times ranging from 78 to 124 minutes, containing 24 unique AYA characters with cancer.

Two trained coders independently worked through every film in a randomly generated order, applying a codebook developed in advance from the existing literature on medical and social issues experienced by AYA survivors. A medical scene was defined as one in which a character interacts with medical personnel or a medical setting, receives cancer-directed therapies or psychosocial support, or experiences symptoms related to cancer or its treatment. A social scene was defined as one in which characters face a challenge caused by cancer in interacting with other people or social institutions. Coders wrote open-ended descriptions of each social scene, then applied 24 unique thematic codes grouped into six categories: physical concerns, processing, survivorship, death salience, caring, and interpersonal interactions. For the thematic coding, half of the movies were double-coded, and interrater agreement calculated with Gwet’s AC1 statistic reached 0.90 or higher for all but three categories, with the remaining values still in the acceptable range at 0.86, 0.87, and 0.89.

The demographic picture that emerged was strikingly narrow. Of the 24 AYA characters, 62.5 percent were female, 79.2 percent were White, and 91.2 percent were heterosexual. About a third suffered from an unspecified cancer, and most prognoses were ambiguous. Most tellingly, 58.3 percent of the characters were dead by the end of their movie. Only 41.7 percent survived to the credits, and just 20.8 percent were explicitly shown achieving no evidence of disease, with the strong implication that many of the remaining survivors would die in the not-so-distant future. That on-screen survival rate stands in dramatic contrast to the nearly 90 percent five-year survival rate for real-world AYA patients in the United States.

The medical content was equally skewed. The 20 films contained 201 unique medical scenes, averaging 10 per movie, with screen time devoted to medical content ranging from 2.3 to 126 minutes and averaging 26 minutes per film. Yet 69.2 percent of those scenes showed the character receiving no cancer treatment at all, and 46.0 percent depicted no cancer or treatment-related symptoms or side effects. When treatment did appear, chemotherapy was the most common, featured in 43.5 percent of treatment scenes, and pain was the most frequently shown symptom, appearing in 33.3 percent of scenes with symptoms. Given that cancer treatment is notoriously time-intensive, the researchers noted that the proportion of screen time allotted to medical scenes falls well short of the time real young patients spend dealing with the immediate and downstream effects of their illness.

On the social side, the films contained 374 unique social scenes, averaging 19 per movie and consuming an average of 55.1 minutes of screen time per film. Death dominated. The death salience category was the most frequently applied, with preparing for death appearing in 43.8 percent of that category’s scenes, followed by bucket list moments and life after the character’s death. The caring category came second, encompassing caregiving, managing others’ emotions, loss of independence, and parenting with cancer. Interpersonal interactions rounded out the top three, led by disclosure of diagnosis and, notably, dark humor, which appeared 31 times across the sample. Survivorship themes, by contrast, accounted for less than 10 percent of social scenes, and reproductive concerns such as fertility preservation, a common worry among young patients, appeared in just seven scenes, or 1.9 percent of the sample, spread across only three movies.

Some elements of the films did ring true. The researchers highlighted the inclusion of caregiving and dark humor as noteworthy because both align with the existing literature on young adults’ social experiences of cancer. Cancer is widely regarded as a communal disease that affects not only the patient but also caregivers, family, and the broader social network, and dark humor, with its sarcasm and absurdity, is a significant characteristic of how young adults cope. The authors suggest that seeing these themes on screen could normalize some real challenges and potentially help survivors cope with or make meaning from their diagnosis. The study also carries limitations: the team acknowledges there is no single source of AYA cancer movies, exact search dates and strings were not recorded, and only one team member screened titles for inclusion, so some eligible films may have been missed. Filmmakers, after all, aim to entertain rather than to document.

Still, the researchers argue that movies are influential precisely because they evoke strong emotions and create vivid mental images, and cognitive research shows that fictional narratives are processed similarly to factual ones, meaning viewers can perceive them as true even when labeled as fiction. With nearly two million AYA cancer survivors living in the United States, the gap between reel and real cancer could shape how both patients and their friends understand treatment, outcomes, and survivorship. The authors propose a practical silver lining: survivors may find that pointing out and explaining a movie’s inaccuracies is an easy way to start conversations about their own experiences with friends. Future research, they say, should determine the effect of these portrayals on survivors and peers alike, and explore whether co-viewing cancer-related movies can help both groups have productive cancer-related conversations.

Subject of Research: Content analysis of how adolescent and young adult cancer is portrayed in movies and implications for supportive care

Article Title: How adolescent and young adult cancer is portrayed in movies: reflections for supportive care

Article References: Collins, M. K. R., Anca, R. S., Pusuloori, B., Carey, D., Long-Traynor, K., Sharma, A., & Devine, K. A. (2026). How adolescent and young adult cancer is portrayed in movies: reflections for supportive care. Supportive Care in Cancer, 34(9), Article 910. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00520-026-11138-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s00520-026-11138-3

Keywords: adolescent and young adult cancer, cancer movies, content analysis, survivorship, psychosocial support, health communication, supportive care, entertainment media, caregiving, Hollywood, adolescent, young