Why nearly all of Hollywood's most valuable stars are still white men

This was supposed to be the year that Hollywood recognised what women and ethnic minority actors are worth.

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Furious 7, the latest instalment of a franchise that started as a story about a white guy before evolving into a multicultural family drama, made US$353 million in the United States and US$1.16 billion worldwide. Empire, Fox's soap opera about a family's fight for control of a record company, made the splashiest television debut in decades. Fresh Off The Boat brought Asian Americans back to TV for the first time in decades.

But while 2015 felt like a year when Hollywood was supposed to recognise that its woeful record on diversity was costing the industry money, Vulture's “Most Valuable Stars” list, released this week, provided some sobering perspective. Jennifer Lawrence, a young female star, may have topped the rankings for women and ethnic minorities. But the analysis still suggests that women and actors from ethnic minorities are still less valuable to Hollywood than white men - and that minority actors and actresses make themselves most valuable to the industry by playing aliens, superheroes or action drones rather than telling their own stories.

Entertainment news website Vulture's “Most Valuable Stars” rankings are useful to look at because they try to get beyond raw box office, which can be boosted by an actor's presence in a big franchise that would do well with or without his or her presence, to measure things like social media clout and appeal with critics. In theory, that ought to bring up the value of some actors who are beloved and admired, but persistently undervalued by an entertainment industry that maintains a conservative, even cowardly, conviction that white men are the only sure draw for audiences.

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But even with those corrective factors, the 2015 list is overwhelmingly white and male. Just 35 women made the list, and they represented only 16 of those in the top 50. Ten per cent of those on the list are from ethnic minorities, just two of whom are women. Of those actors, Dwayne Johnson, Vin Diesel and Zoe Saldana and Lupita Nyong'o are of mixed race, Idris Elba's parents are from Sierra Leone and Ghana, and Denzel Washington, Will Smith, Kevin Hart, Jamie Foxx and Tyler Perry are African-American.

Saldana and Nyong'o are the only two minority women on the list. A look at their upcoming projects suggests that Hollywood finds them valuable in a very specific way.

Since Nyong'o won a best supporting actress Oscar for her role in 12 Years A Slave at the 2014 Academy Awards, she's booked only three movies, an unusually small number for someone who is supposed to be a breakout star. And in only one of them, Queen of Katwe, about a young Ugandan chess star, will Nyong'o's actual face appear on screen. She's being shot in motion capture for Star Wars: Episode VII-The Force Awakens, and she's doing voice work for The Jungle Book.

Saldana has fared slightly better, thanks to her starring role in the Avatar, Guardians of the Galaxy and Star Trek franchises. But she's a blue alien in the Avatar films and a green one in Guardians of the Galaxy. In four of the nine upcoming movies Saldana has in the pipeline, she'll appear behind a face other than her own.