Do diverse movies really make more money?

Hollywood Gadfly reached out to ask me to look into the data around the recent UCLA Hollywood Diversity report (you can read his take here).UCLA have been publishing annual reports on diversity in Hollywood since 2014 (covering films from 2011 onwards), each with the core finding that diverse movies make more money. Gadfly’s contention was that nobody ever seems to check the maths behind these claims. I realised I too had been reading versions of that headline for years but had never once checked it myself. So I decided to take up the challenge and address the question: Do movies with diverse cast members make more money?What I ended up uncovering was far more interesting than I thought it would be at first, and I learned a lot along the way about measuring subjective topics.This is a long, complex piece, so I thought I’d help everyone with a TL;DR before we get into the detail:Diversity is not one thing. “A diverse cast” can be measured in at least six defensible ways, with each…