Of course you can't really determine whether or not Rinko would have the same effect on a film as Scarlett. In fact, I highly ScarJo wouldn't bring in more all other factors of the film being equal. But that's not really the argument I'm making. The argument I'm making is that people are using the notion that a movie star is the number one reason people go to the movies anymore to explain why unknow Asian actors can't be cast for obstensibly Asian roles (lol), when anyone who has gone to the movies in the past decade probably intuitively knows that's a crock of shit, because they either went to the movies to see shit explode, see some nerdy shit like dinosaurs, robots, or comic book panels come alive through modern CGI tech, or they went to get scared by shaky camera work and jump scares of which a "bankable actor" need not apply for. And if people don't intuitively know that then Super Statistics Man is here to save the day.
Apparently stars are only worth an extra $3 million of revenue. That's what a film more likely to be headlined by ScarJo earns in like a few minutes upon opening in America. It's peanuts.
The reason we don't have any "bankable Asian stars" is because Hollywood just won't cast Asians in bankable roles to cultivate them into household names, and they do this because producers and the like use the outdated, racist notion that white actors are like honey to the flies of the public as collateral to position themselves as having done all they could to try and save a turd. "Don't look at me! I cast ScarJo! I did my job! I guess it's the
audience's fault for not being interested in x, y, and z." And the stockholders nod their heads, and the result is we get the same shit over and over again, or we run into problems like this where people are scrambling to explain away why a Japanese property is starring a white woman in a multicultural society.