FORBES.COM OCTOBER 20 20122
THE^PROFILEwire, to the east by a mile-long stretch of train tracks and to
the south by the din of State Highway 154. It’s sandwiched
between two neighborhoods that have seen better days, with
rows of middle-class houses, some spiffed up with bright
landscaping, most with faded paint and chipped siding. More
than a few are littered with old mattresses left to the elements.
Inside the gates, though, is a paradise no one enjoys more
than Perry. During a visit last fall, he zipped around in a Po-
laris Ranger to the new soundstages he opened and chris-
tened with the names of showbiz legends including Oprah
Winfrey, Spike Lee, Sidney Poitier and Denzel Washington.
As he drove, he called out the highlights—a strip mall, a yacht,
an empty soundstage, a house fronted by four façades—and
then, after rumbling over the abandoned golf course, gestured
toward his favorite new purchase: a replica White House.
“I own the lights. I own the sets,” Perry says, before set-
tling into a couch in his office on the top floor of a modern,
renovated four-story structure he calls the Dream Building.
“So that’s where the difference is. Because I own everything,
my returns are higher.”
He paid $30 million for the property in 2015 and has
since spent $250 million building a studio operation that’s
now more than twice the size of the storied Warner Bros.
backlot in Burbank, California—all of it paid for with the
cash he’s brought in churning out movies and television
programming for the past 15 years. The acquisition was a
masterstroke, giving him a place to build a top-tier mov-
ie facility in a state that aggressively courts Hollywood pro-
ductions, as well as a huge swath of land smack in the mid-
dle of one of Atlanta’s red-hot economic Opportunity Zones.
“I love land the way some women love shoes,” says Win-
frey, one of the few people to see the property when Perry
was considering making an offer. “I said ‘If you don’t take it,
I will.’ It was astounding to me. I am officially in awe.”In truth, it was a deal that perhaps only Perry could have
made. He’s been operating out of Atlanta since he released
Diary in 2005; in the ensuing 15 years he has produced at
least one feature film every year, as well as 13 more televi-
sion series, nearly all of it filmed in and around the city.
When it came to the fading army base, Atlanta was in
need of a development partner who might inspire commer-
cial activity that could help revitalize the otherwise forgot-ten section of the city’s southern edges. Perry had an in—
not only via his rapport with President Obama, who at the
time could have nixed any deal for the military land—but
through his history of offering jobs to local crews.
His timing couldn’t have been better. In 2008, the Geor-
gia Film Office had piled on tax incentives for production
companies, and Perry made his purchase amid the stream-
ing revolution, which triggered an arms race for content
that has spurred a boom in demand for soundstages.
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 practi-
cally built the BET+ streaming service around him. The net-
work will pay Perry $150 million annually to produce a min-
imum of 90 episodes of new TV each year until 2025. BET,
its streaming service—which hit a million subscribers in Au-
gust—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. Af-
ter 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.
Fueled by those Georgia tax breaks, meanwhile, others
are on hand to soak up extra capacity as well. Perry has
rented studio space to major productions including Walt
Disney’s Black Panther, the Will Smith sequel Bad Boys for
Life and TV’s The Walking Dead. Last year Disney, Warner
Bros. and other major studios, as well as new entrants like
Netflix, Amazon and Apple, spent a combined $100 billion
on original content, according to Frank Patterson, CEO of
Pinewood Atlanta Studios, a rival lot 20 miles to the south.
With his studio humming, Perry is taking a page from
Disney and Universal for lot development, with plans to
build restaurants, shops and an entertainment complex
with a theater and a theme park–like experience. Think
Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, but with the feel of a down-
home Southern kitchen. Perry admits that such a venture
will take him outside of his comfort zone in terms of scope,
control—and debt, since his business has always been, ex-
traordinarily, a self-financed, all-cash operation. His plans
also include housing for trafficked women and LGBTQ
youth, and an academy to teach kids who grew up like he
did the things he never learned—financial literacy, for one.
The risk, though, is worth it. “I can go outside and take this
dirt and put it on my hands and know that there were Con-
federate soldiers here walking this land, plotting and plan-
ning everything they could to keep us Negroes in place,” Per-
ry says. “The very fact that I am here on this land, the very
fact that hundreds of people—Black and brown people—
come here to make a living, that is effecting change.”“THE FACT THAT I AM HER E ON
CONFEDER ATE LAND, AND
THAT HUNDR EDS OF BLACK
AND BROWN PEOPLE COME
HER E TO MAKE A LIVING,
THAT IS EFFECTING CHANGE.”