Tyler Perry Studios began in 2006 as a converted production facility in southwest Atlanta, built from Perry’s earnings touring Black theater’s Chitlin Circuit and adapting his stage plays into films. It was successful enough that by 2015, Perry was able to purchase 330 acres of a much larger site: the former Fort McPherson, a U.S. Army installation dating to 1885 that had served as a Confederate Army base during the Civil War. Perry paid $30 million for the land and invested more than $250 million transforming it, preserving forty historic buildings on the National Register of Historic Places in the process.
The new campus opened to the public in October 2019. At 330 acres, it is larger than the combined Burbank studio lots of Walt Disney, Warner Bros., and Paramount — the largest film production facility in the United States, and the first major studio in the country to be owned outright by an African American. Its twelve sound stages, ranging from 10,000 to 35,000 square feet, are each named for a Black artist Perry credits with shaping the culture: Denzel Washington, Oprah Winfrey, Halle Berry, Sidney Poitier, Spike Lee, Cicely Tyson, Whoopi Goldberg, and Harry Belafonte among them. The lot includes a scaled White House replica with a working Oval Office, an airport terminal, a mock jumbo jet, a hospital set, and a full suburban subdivision built for location shooting without leaving the property.
At the grand opening, Perry connected the studio directly to the exclusion he’d experienced earlier in his own career: “I’ve been on sets where I’ve been the only Black face… as recently as 2019, going, ‘Where are the Black people in this movie behind the camera?’” Oprah Winfrey, at the same event, put it more simply: “He didn’t wait for Hollywood. He didn’t wait for anyone to tell him how to do it. He did it his way.” In 2022, Perry and T.D. Jakes purchased an additional 37.5 acres for expansion, bringing the full campus to roughly 487 acres. Perry’s model has since been followed by other Black entertainers building their own production infrastructure, including 50 Cent’s G-Unit Film and Television Studios in Shreveport, Louisiana (2024) and Katt Williams’s purchase of the former Fort McClellan base in Alabama that same year.