With over a billion people smoking throughout the world, JUUL noticed a “huge public health opportunity.” Entitled Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, Netflix’s forthcoming docuseries will take an intrinsic, in-depth look at how the e-cig empire captured the hearts of global youth.
Directed by R.J. Cutler of notable documentaries Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry and Belushi, per the Netflix logline, the film will focus on the “scrappy electronic cigarette startup [that] becomes a multibillion-dollar company until an epidemic causes its success to go up in smoke.”
“In the early 2000s, there was this sense that tech could do no wrong,” one man asserts at the trailer’s opening. “Move fast and break things, that’s the tech ethos.” Noting Apple‘s marketing tactics as a “huge inspiration”, JUUL’s team explains the way they chose to similarly position the e-cigarette as a “beautiful product to be worshipped.” With an initial goal to eliminate big Tobacco, the series explores the tragic fate of the Stanford-led startup, as it eventually succumbed to big tobacco and left a plethora of young smokers suffering from critical lung damage.
Juul was the fastest-growing company in history. Now, they’re a cautionary tale.
Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul premieres October 11. pic.twitter.com/3qcIhUdgEe
— Netflix (@netflix) September 21, 2023
“I don’t think anyone could have anticipated how many children would want this product,” one woman claims as footage of students in school bathrooms and infamous Instagram posts of teenagers blowing smoke survey the screen. “James and Adam had lost control,” another man comments, as more jarring clips of kids and teens in hospital beds and hooked up to ventilators cement that assertion.
Stream the full trailer above and keep an eye out for Big Vape: The Rise and Fall of Juul, which lands on Netflix on October 11.
In other entertainment news, AKA Mr. Chow, a documentary on culinary icon Michael Chow, lands on HBO later this fall.
