Tyler Perry’s last feature film earned a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes — a point that’s apparently of little concern to him. The billionaire filmmaker, best known for his franchise character Madea , is far more interested in the opinions of his fans than those of “highbrow” critics, he said on the “Baby, This is Keke Palmer” podcast. “For everyone who is a critic,” Perry said in the Tuesday episode, “I have thousands of — used to be — emails from people saying: ‘This changed my life.
Oh, my God, you know me. Oh, my God, you saw me. How did you know this about my life and my family?’ So that is what is important.
” Critiques of Perry and his purportedly flat depictions of Black characters date back to his early directing days. Spike Lee, for one, in 2009 famously alluded to Perry’s work while complaining about the “buffoonery” in Black comedy. More recently, playwright Michael R.
Jackson took his turn swinging at the movie mogul in his metafictional musical “A Strange Loop.” In the number “Tyler Perry Writes Real Life,” Jackson’s protagonist — a Broadway usher who dreams of being a writer — denounces Perry’s oeuvre: “The crap he puts on stage, film and TV / Makes my bile want to rise!” The song wasn’t born of any “personal vendetta,” Jackson told Washington Post Live in 2022. “It’s really about actually taking Tyler Perry’s work very seriously, because it’s often held up, often by Black communities, as sort of, .