The conventional wisdom in Hollywood is that movies by and about people of color dont perform well with audiences. But the massive box office numbers for Marvel s Black Panther are just the latest piece of evidence that thats simply not true. And as a new study from the University of California, Los Angeles , demonstrates, entertainment executives have been slow to recognize that diversity is essential for Hollywoods bottom line.

The findings of the report on diversity and representation, released Tuesday, match those of similar studies that have shown incremental improvements over the last few years, obscuring a lack of lasting, systemic change in Hollywood .

The report, Five Years of Progress and Missed Opportunities, also illuminates the discrepancy between audiences preferences for diverse projects and the idea, still common among industry leaders, that diversity somehow hurts Hollywoods financial prospects particularly with international audiences, a major source of revenue.

Hollywood executives tend to treat movies like Black Panther as the exception rather than the rule, the report says hence the missed opportunities of the title. Despite mounting evidence that diverse movies and shows perform well with increasingly diverse audiences, executives often dismiss these successful projects as anomalies, the researchers note.

Our findings reveal that, regardless of race, audiences want to see diversity on the screen, UCLA social psychologist Ana-Christina Ramn, one of the reports co-authors, wrote. Our reports have continually shown that diversity sells, but the TV and film product continues to fall short. So audiences are left starved for more representation on screen that reflects the world they see in their daily lives.

Analyzing major movies released in 2016 and TV series that aired or streamed online during the 2015-16 season, the UCLA researchers found that projects with diverse casts reported the highest box office and viewership numbers.

Many of 2016s top movies at the box office had a combination of significant minority casts and significant minority audiences. Films where people of color accounted for 10 percent of the cast or less tended to perform poorly, yet Hollywood continues to produce them.