Monday, 03.24.08

Tyler Perry Marches On

Photo by Jesse Grant/Getty Images

Horton Hear a Who topped the box office for the second straight weekend, but Tyler Perry's Meet the Browns came in a close second.

Ho-hum: Another Perry film, another twenty-million dollar opening weekend. A decade ago, Perry was living out of his car, struggling to raise enough money to keep his plays up and running on the so-called "chitlin' circuit." Today, he's sitting atop an entertainment empire that spans theater and film, publishing and television. Yet if you aren't in his target demographic - black and middle-class, and maybe with a relative who reminds you just a little bit of Madea, his most memorable creation - then odds are you don't know a thing about him; indeed, your first Perry encounter won't happen come next summer, when he'll play the head of Starfleet Academy in J.J. Abrams' Star Trek revival.

Perry's ongoing under-the-radar success is a reminder that even in the age of "independent" cinema and pay cable, the movie industry often functions less like a competitive marketplace than a lumbering, brain-dead monopoly. Perry is a talented and hardworking guy, but as the critics will be happy to tell you, he isn't all that talented; he's become a sensation in part because the competition in his particular niche -- middlebrow entertainments pitched to African-American audiences -- is so persistently thin. It isn't racism, exactly, that lets Perry have his audience more or less all too himself; it's the same kind of Hollywood tunnel vision that looked at The Passion of the Christ's enormous success and decided that the appropriate response was to try to market anti-religious films to the church-going audience that made The Passion such a blockbuster. In theory, the studios are out to find out what the moviegoing public wants and give it to them. In practice, though, they seem far more comfortable doing what they've always done, and finding a way to sell it, than taking the risks necessary to woo and win an underserved part of their audience.

— Ross Douthat

Filed Under: African Americans, film, middle class, movies

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