The domestic motion picture and television production industries are temporarily stalled by a Writer’s strike.
And though much of the industry now is distributed across many right-to-work states like Georgia, the related artistic and production unions are honoring the strike, refusing to cross picket lines. It places an indefinite pause on millions of dollars invested in productions by major and minor studios alike.
Paramount Global, formerly Viacom and now part of the CBS Entertainment Group, began shopping around B.E.T. Media Group more than a year ago. Despite owning, airing, and streaming a good bit of prestige programming, including the lucrative Star Trek franchise, Paramount of late has been hemorrhaging red ink.
B.E.T. Media includes Black Entertainment Television and BET Plus (streaming version of the network) as well as VH-1.
One of B.E.T.’s most prolific content providers and partners and largest producer for BET Plus is film mogul, producer, actor, writer, and director Tyler Perry.
Moving to Atlanta at age 22 in 1990, Perry used his $12,000 life savings to stage a musical production, which admittedly was less than a modest success. But Perry persisted, rewriting and retooling that play, as well as launching other productions across what was then referred to as “The Chitlin Theater” circuit, primarily performed live before urban and minority audiences.
By 2005, Forbes reported that various Tyler Perry stage shows and productions had generated about $100 million in ticket sales, another $30 million in videos of those shows, and an estimated $ 20 million in merchandising. Perry was producing an estimated 300 live shows annually, with an average of 35,000 in weekly aggregate attendance.
By 2005, Perry was able to use those ticket sales to finance his first motion picture, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, which included the introduction to mass audiences of Perry’s staple character, Mabel “Madea” Simmons, a colorful, protective, and memorable aging Black woman (as well as coincidentally a lifelong resident of Atlanta), played by Perry.
A long list of Madea comedies would follow, and I am admittedly a fan.
Perry could have stopped there and been a very wealthy man, but instead, he branched out into television production, first with Tyler Perry’s House of Payne, which ran for eight seasons from 2006-2011 on TBS.
In 2011, Forbes Magazine noted Perry was the highest-paid man in the entertainment industry – yet he was still aiming higher. In 2015, he acquired 330 acres of the former Fort McPherson U.S. Army military base, straddling East Point and the southernmost tip of the city of Atlanta. What has become Tyler Perry Studios now includes 12-sound stages, a White House replica stage, and dozens of structures remaining from Fort Mac dating back to the late 1800s.
Perry Studios was the home production facility in 2018 for the blockbuster Black Panther, and Perry entered into long-term agreements with Viacom and later BET Plus for new programs and content production during 2017 and 2019.
Lionsgate Films a co-producer and distributer of Perry’s films, in 2022 announced the construction and development of a $200-million studio and production facility in Douglas County. Perry also made Douglas County his home, building a spectacular $100-million compound there. In 2021, Forbes estimated Perry’s net worth to be in excess of $1 billion.
It now appears Perry has won a bidding war of sorts to acquire the entire B.E.T. Entertainment Group. Perry’s work for the BET Plus streaming service was helping to generate the bulk of BET’s revenue growth, as well as 3 million paying subscribers. However, B.E.T. and VH-1 are currently based in New York City, where production, talent, and certainly housing costs are among the highest in the nation.
I’m betting that once the deal closes, Tyler Perry might look to add the title ‘developer’ to his resume, much as the Trilith Studios (formerly Pinewood Studios) in nearby Fayetteville has become a fast-growing live-work-play community. Whether within the existing Tyler Perry Studios campus, perhaps at the new Lionsgate facilities, or even closer to Perry’s residential compound, Perrywood has a nice ring to it.
The capital needed, given current interest rates to build out such a complex might be best found in the IPO market.
To date, Tyler Perry owns everything he has created, but if he decides to share that ownership in the form of stock in his latest expansion and combined enterprise, I will be betting on Tyler Perry. Makes a nice home for a new B.E.T. headquarters, too.