In 1959, trailblazing Asian American actor Anna May Wong lamented that when I die, my epitaph should be: I died a thousand deaths, referring to the many times her characters were killed off in her movies.

More than six decades later, Wongs observation sadly remains relevant. In 2019, over a quarter of Asian, Asian American and Pacific Islander (API) characters in the years top 100 movies at the box office were dead by the end of the movie, and all but one died violently. This is just one of a slew of harmful tropes about API people and communities that many Hollywood creators continue to perpetuate on-screen, according to a new study released Tuesday .

Despite years of facing public pressure and making promises to improve diversity and inclusion, the entertainment industry continues to pay API representation little more than lip service and must take responsibility for problematic representations of Asians and Pacific Islanders, said the studys co-authors, sociologist Nancy Wang Yuen and University of Southern California professor Stacy L. Smith, founder of the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative.

The new analysis, funded by Amazon Studios and UTA Foundation, utilized the Annenberg Inclusion Initiatives existing database of the top 100 highest-grossing films each year from 2007 to 2019, the basis for the groups annual studies on representation in Hollywood . Yuen, Smith and a team of researchers and students took a deeper look at API representation in the 1,300 films and 51,159 speaking characters in the database.

Only 5.9% of the characters were API, not proportionate with the 7.1% of the U.S. population that identifies as Asian, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. Just 44 out of the 1,300 films had a lead or co-lead actor who was API. Of the 44, 14 of them starred Dwayne The Rock Johnson.

The results were even more paltry for API women: in 13 years, just six of the top-grossing films had API women as the lead or co-lead.

White male actors named Ben, Chris, Daniel, James, Jason, John, Josh, Michael, Robert, Sean, or Tom were far more likely to be hired as the top actor in a film than an API woman actor with any name auditioning in all of Hollywood, the study found.

The team also zoomed in on the characters from the top movies of 2019 to better understand how API people are portrayed in the few instances when they do appear on-screen. The study found that API roles are rarely leading characters and are often silenced, stereotyped, tokenized, isolated, and sidekicks/villains. For example, 67% of the characters reflect tired tropes, such as the mocking depiction of Bruce Lee in Quentin Tarantinos Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. As many as 30% of the characters were either the only API character in the entire film or interacted with no other API characters.