Hollywood executives are deprioritizing diversity at their own peril, a new report out Thursday warns.

Diversity is essential to the entertainment industrys survival as moviegoers of color consistently drive box-office success, movies with more diverse casts tend to perform best at the box office and prioritizing diversity behind the camera is often what ensures diversity on screen. These have all been consistent findings in the annual editions of the UCLA Hollywood Diversity Report, including in the latest report , released Thursday.

For over a decade, the team behind the report, led by UCLA sociologists Ana-Christina Ramn and Darnell Hunt, has tracked the relationship between diversity and Hollywoods bottom line. The reports have perennially documented how people of color drive box office success , both as consumers and producers.

All of that once again held true in 2023, when people of color dominated opening weekend sales for 14 of the top 20 highest-earning films premiering in U.S. theaters. In addition, women drove the box office success of three of the top 10 films, including the highest-grossing movie of last year, Barbie. (The researchers plan to release a second installment of the report, examining streaming films, later this year.)

The report has routinely documented that audiences will show up for movies with diverse casts. That was once again the case in 2023, with blockbusters like Barbie, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which all featured casts with a significant portion of actors of color.

For the second consecutive year, the researchers tracked disability as a category. In 2023, three of the 20 biggest films at the box office, and one of the top 10, featured casts in which more than 20% of the actors had a known disability, they found.

These patterns also hold at the global box office. The report has continually challenged Hollywood executives conventional wisdom that diversity doesnt sell internationally. Once again, the global box office results in 2023 debunked that myth as movies with predominantly white casts consistently underperformed internationally, according to the report. In 2023, nine of the top 10 films at the global box office featured casts that were more than 30% people of color. Movies with 11% or fewer actors of color did the worst at the global box office, making just $18.2 million. Financial success also comes to movies that prioritize gender diversity: Half of the 10 biggest films worldwide featured more than 40% women in their casts.

Once again, these findings bust the myth that diversity does not travel, the researchers wrote. This report series has repeatedly found that films with casts that are racially and ethnically diverse perform well in international markets. As diverse as the U.S. audience, global audiences want to see themselves reflected on screen.

As an industry governed by the bottom line, Hollywood loves to make as much money as it can from existing intellectual property. But that usually produces success only when filmmakers get opportunities to take creative leaps and make something original from an existing idea, like Barbie. According to the report, this is also true when new installments of long-running franchises feature more diverse casting. In 2023, Creed III, Scream VI and John Wick: Chapter 4 all featured lead actors of color and casts with 50 percent or more actors of color, according to the report. That diversity paid off quite literally: Audiences of color made up at least 60% of each movies opening weekend audience at the U.S. box office, and each movie became the highest-grossing installment of their respective franchises to date.

When the film industry gives them what they want, people of color deliver at the box office year in and year out, Ramn, director of the Entertainment and Media Research Initiative at UCLA, said in a statement. Hunt, the reports co-author, is UCLAs executive vice chancellor and provost.