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Tyler Perry and his rise to fame is a modern-day rags to riches story for the ages, and he’s given back countless times over to other Black creators such as himself. It was announced this week that Perry’s fortune was estimated at $1 billion, making him one of the most powerful men in show business.
In a profile from Forbes, Perry, who turns 51 later this month, invited the publication on the set of his sprawling Tyler Perry Studios set as he directed an episode of the BET series, Sistas this past July in Atlanta.
The publication mentions that Perry has earned around $1.4 billion in pretax income since 2005 and has leveraged his savvy to secure a high-profile deal with ViacomCBS that earns him $150 million annually for content development and a stake in the new BET+ streaming service.
Most importantly, the piece notes that Perry owns 100 percent of the content he produces and the studio has become a lesson in film and television production in the era of COVID-19.
More from Forbes:
Even during the pandemic, he’s keeping it all humming. With Madea retired and an exclusive deal with Winfrey’s OWN network expired, Perry set his sights last year on BET, which has been struggling for direction and has now practically built the BET+ streaming service around him. The network will pay Perry $150 million annually to produce a minimum of 90 episodes of new TV each year until 2025. BET, its streaming service—which hit a million subscribers in August—and other Viacom properties get exclusive rights to air those shows for five years, as well as the reruns of his House of Payne, Meet the Browns and For Better or Worse, plus some of his early stage work, which Cary is beginning to exploit. After that half-decade, the rights to all those BET-funded shows revert to Perry. The first two—The Oval and Sistas—became BET’s two top-rated programs in their first seasons.
The best part? “I don’t have a noncompete,” Perry says, which means still more projects, such as A Fall From Grace, which debuted in January on Netflix to terrible reviews—and 26 million streams in its first week. He also plans to start financing productions from other Black creators whom Hollywood has overlooked.
Read the entire Forbes Tyler Perry profile here.
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Photo: WENN
