Everywhere in the world, people are a big fan of Hollywood movies. It is their action, commendable storyline and the casting of actors, what attracts the viewers. Have you ever wondered why is Hollywood not into casting non-white actors for the prominent roles? Well, stick on to the article to fill in yourselves on the same. According to Time magazine, in the past 25 years, only 11 percent of the non-white actors have been nominated for Academy Awards. According to the movie executives, the fact that non-white stars aren’t bankable is one of the reasons for not casting them. To get into the real answer to it, Venkat Kuppuswamy, an assistant professor at the Northeastern University looked into the response given by the movie executive and saw a research question: Is it true that movies with more diverse casts don’t sell? For the answer to the question, he had to rely on an unlikely source which was the hack of Sony Pictures data by North Korean hackers in 2014. From the data, Kuppuswamy found out that casts with more diverse casts are more profitable than the one with all white casts.
“Diversity has a premium both domestically and abroad. Even the argument that foreign box office figures would be hurt by diverse casting is false,” said Kuppuswamy who studies the economic effects of the decisions based on the diversity that companies make.
To get a clearer picture, Kuppuswamy and Peter Youkin, Kuppuswamy’s colleague at the University of Oregon worked together in getting access to closely guarded international profit and loss statements from production houses. They found out that diversity is not a hurdle to a blockbuster.
“Diversity had no negative effect on white audiences, and different kinds of diverse populations all reacted very favorably to movies with at least two black actors,” Kuppuswamy said.
They concluded their research by stating that diversity has no negative effect. However, it is the executives who experience a sense of surprise when a movie with a black lead actor does well ignoring the fact that there’s a market for them. As far as the audience is concerned, they are least affected by the lead cast being a non-white or a white.
Priyanka Rawat