Tyler Perry Studios: A Hollywood Lot in Southwest Atlanta

From a $12,000 play to a movie empire

Tyler Perry was born in New Orleans in 1969 and moved to Atlanta around 1990. In 1992 he spent his savings, about $12,000, staging his first musical play, I Know I've Been Changed, at a community theater. It did not catch on at first. He kept reworking it, and in 1998 it finally broke through with shows at the House of Blues and Atlanta's Fox Theatre.

Along the way he created Madea, the tough, quick-talking older woman he plays himself. Diary of a Mad Black Woman took her to movie theaters in 2005 and earned about $50.6 million in the United States. Television followed with House of Payne on TBS and a long run of dramas for OWN, including The Haves and the Have Nots.

Building his own lot

Perry wanted to make his shows on his own property. His first studio opened in 2006 on Krog Street in Inman Park, a building that later became the popular Krog Street Market food hall. In 2008 he moved to a larger campus in southwest Atlanta, then went much bigger: in 2015 he bought 330 acres in southwest Atlanta, between downtown and the airport, to build a full Hollywood-scale studio.

The new Tyler Perry Studios held its grand opening gala on October 5, 2019. Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, Cicely Tyson, Samuel L. Jackson and Halle Berry were among the guests who came to celebrate one of the largest production facilities in the country, and one of very few major studios owned outright by a Black filmmaker.

Stages named for legends

The campus has 12 soundstages covering roughly 189,500 square feet, and every one honors a Black entertainment pioneer. Walk the lot and you pass stages named for Oprah Winfrey, Whoopi Goldberg, Will Smith, Cicely Tyson, Diahann Carroll, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, John Singleton, Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte, Della Reese and Spike Lee, Halle Berry and Denzel Washington.

Outside, about 50,000 square feet of permanent sets let crews shoot without leaving the gates. There is a grand hotel lobby, a 16,000 square foot mansion, a diner, a trailer park, a courtroom and a residential street with a dozen working homes. Perry's own teams are known for speed, filming far more script pages per day than a typical production.

A landmark of ambition

For Atlanta, the studio is proof of what a single storyteller can build. A writer who started with one play and a small savings account now runs one of the biggest film campuses in the South, with the city's crews, carpenters, caterers and drivers working alongside him.

In 2021 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave Perry the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. The studio is a working lot rather than a tourist attraction, so most fans see it from the landscaped entrance on the southwest side of the city.

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