UCLA: Movies make more $$$ when only half the cast is white

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Movies make more money when exactly half the cast is not white, according to an annual analysis that shows an even stronger connection between diversity and profits – and suggests how profoundly out of touch the motion picture academy is when giving Oscars only to white actors.

In previous years, movies did better at the box office if two or three of the top eight billed actors were non-white. The latest review, examining 2014 ticket sales, shows four of eight is the magic number, UCLA's Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies found.

"When we look at film, we see an even stronger relationship between cast diversity and box office," said Darnell Hunt, director of the center, which focuses on African American studies, at the University of California, Los Angeles.

"These aren't momentary glitches. It's the handwriting on the wall," Hunt said.

Not every top-performing film has a hugely diverse cast — you have to scan down to the eighth listed actor in 2014's best movie, "Transformers: Age of Extinction," on IMDb.com to find Chinese actress Bingbing Li.

But in the study released today, the Bunche Center took roughly the top 200 films of the last few years and looked at the median global haul at each grouping of diversity — from zero non-white actors to one, two, three, four, and then five and over.

The best grouping – where half the main cast was non-white – had a median ticket revenue of $122.2 million, higher than any other group. That's more than double the $52.6 million median haul for films with no non-white actors in the top eight. Films where more than half the actors in the main cast were non-white also had a median of just $52.4 million.