It was a plot twist that could only come from Tyler Perry: four years after announcing an $800m expansion of his 330-acre (328-hectare) film and TV studio, Perry put those plans on hold after being wowed by a new OpenAI tool that generates videos from text prompts.
“If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text,” he told the Hollywood Reporter in February. “If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like it’s nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains. I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me.” Those who have long been frustrated by Perry hackery surely must be feeling unsettled, too.
Hollywood has never known a star quite like Perry – lead of the campy Madea comedy film franchise, producing partner to Oprah and Lee Daniels, and scene partner to Ben Affleck (Gone Girl) and Cate Blanchett (Don’t Look Up). But it’s as a writer and director that Perry produces the kind of work that could at least be started by an online generator – usually, some version of: “Black woman struggles to find her way in the world again after cruel Black man casts her aside.” Christian values are always at the forefront; Madea, Perry’s gun-toting granny character, is added to taste. The formula has made Perry one of the most powerful people in Hollywood, with a studio that dwarfs every “big five” lot but Universal’s and streaming deals with Amazon and Netflix. It’s also made the Perry name a byword for cringe content.
More than a week before his latest film, Divorce in the Black, was slated for an Amazon Prime debut, we made the pro forma request to review a screener only to be told to wait to see it with the public. Now that the film is out, it’s clear Amazon PR was trying to head off the avalanche of negative feedback. A few days after release, the Rotten Tomatoes critic score is 0%. In my one-star review I called it his worst film yet.
Much of this is down to the 54-year-old Perry, the first content creator among his generation of auteurs. This is a man who insists on hogging credit for the most important work in his ostensibly collaborative industry while making a point of rejecting help from union writers and actors. He brags about writing reams of scripts himself (oftentimes while commuting on his private jet), takes pride in blitzing through scenes in a single take and generally approaches work like a drug habit. It shows.
To watch a Tyler Perry film – I mean, really watch it – is to grow increasingly frustrated by out-of-focus camera work, dreadful hair and makeup treatments, and moments that never feel earned. But it’s his flair for over-the-top plot twists that will have you screaming: Whose brain fragments are in that painting if the girlfriend’s not dead?! (Mea Culpa) Or better yet: How TF did Taraji get on that boat?! (Acrimony) Perry makes content like someone who’s never taken a production note – which explains his past disdain for critics who know better. (Famously, he told Spike Lee to “go to hell” for criticizing the Madea movies.) Even Not Another Church Movie, which parodies Perry’s formula, landed with a thud.
Perry has no ambition to helm a multimillion-dollar project that might be taken seriously. “The bigger the budget the more the risks, and I just don’t – for my way of storytelling for my audience, and the way we like to see things, and hear things – I just don’t think that it’s necessary for me,” he said before the 2019 opening of his studio. That audience – not just Black people but the churchgoing subset that supported his early stage play tours – has afforded Perry considerable artistic latitude. But it’s worth considering the knock-on effects when Perry, as the University of San Diego professor Eric Pierson puts it, “has been the dominant manufacturer of popular Black images” for the past two decades. Already, his five-year-old TV drama Sistas has more episodes (153 and counting) than Good Times (133).
All of this becomes more troubling when Perry incorporates ideas into his work that he himself does not appear to fully understand (colorism, domestic abuse, romantic love), resulting in projects that tip into hoary Christian moralism and negative racial stereotypes. In Perry’s 2013 film Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor, an unfaithful wife contracts HIV after cheating on her husband, who lives happily ever after with a new wife and family. In 2010’s For Colored Girls, Janet Jackson’s character contracts HIV from her husband’s infidelity with other men. Perry may not be able to handle criticism, but he’s definitely judging you. If he has any real gift, it’s his ability to deliver these sermons while sometimes dressed in drag without his devoutly Christian fanbase crying hypocrisy. (Perry had said he would ditch the Madea character, only to wind up reprising her to help meet his Netflix obligation.)
Nevertheless: Divorce in the Black shot to No 2 on Prime Video’s list of top US streams – and this after Mea Culpa soared to Netflix’s top spot. Epically shoddy craftsmanship aside, people root for Perry because it wasn’t so long ago that he was desperate for work and sleeping in his car. Meagan Good, the star of Divorce in the Black and a 30-year industry veteran, is the latest actor to credit Perry for her biggest payday. Tyler Perry Studios, built on what was once a confederate army base, is the backbone of Georgia’s entertainment industry. While he’s churning out the schlock, big five studios are shooting Avengers, Bad Boys and other franchise films on his lot.
Perry’s nagging habit of blurring the lines between art and artist only makes him more relatable to Black audiences who also struggle to separate the two. (Good and Cory Hardrict’s starring roles in Divorce in the Black come after their respective high-profile splits roiled Black celebrity gossip merchants.) A forthcoming Netflix project titled Straw features a cast of beloved actors that includes the comedian Sinbad, who is on the mend from a 2020 stroke. Even if it is a PR game, Perry has a knack for looking out for the creatives Black audiences care about most – down to rallying to Will Smith’s side at the Oscars in the wake of the Slap. And then, for good measure, Perry will let Harry and Meghan hide out in his mansion for a few months before even properly meeting them.
Tyler Perry is a great American success story, a Black man who’s truly free to make whatever kind of movie or TV show that he wants. That’s what makes him so frustrating. He could be better than a human content generator.
