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Coming soon: Tyler Perry action figures

Kim Hollis: Tyler Perry continued his run of off-season box office domination with the $23.4 million debut of I Can Do Bad All By Myself. How has he remained so consistent? Do you see saturation becoming an issue any time soon?

Josh Spiegel: Somewhere down the road, things may peter out a bit, but for the time being, Tyler Perry and his brand of filmmaking are doing just fine. This result could be attributed to the relatively lackluster list of new releases, the addition of a recent Academy Award nominee as the female lead, or any other number of options. At the end of the day, Perry's movies make money because he focuses only on marketing his films to exactly the people who will see them, instead of the so-called mass audience. His formula continues to work.

Tim Briody: Is he out of plays turned films yet? When he's out of content to adapt to the big screen I could see some drop off but if he's got five more Madea adaptations in his back pocket, look out.

Reagen Sulewski: These films are up there with Crocs for me as far as mystifying cultural phenomena of the last five years go. I am admittedly very white and Canadian (so, like, double white), but I don't think I've ever met a single person that's ever seen one of them. In a macro-sense, it's a bit like any other extremely targeted genre, like a horror film or Christian-themed films (which I realize these sort of are indirectly) - make them cheap and take your captive audience and go home. Your audience doesn't really care about quality relative to other films, just that they get something that's aimed at them.





Jim Van Nest: Like Reagen, I've never seen a Tyler Perry flick...don't even know someone that has. To me, this is really uncharted territory. Have we ever seen anything like this? Sure, there are other niche genres/audiences, but none of them even come close to the financial success of Tyler Perry. Considering he shouldn't be doing what he is doing, I think we can throw out the rule book and I see no reason that his success should stop anytime soon.

Jason Lee: If the market isn't tired of Madea by now then I have a hard time imagining box-office fatigue in the years to come. There is clearly an audience for this type of film and so long as Tyler Perry serves it up in a way that pleases his audience, he's got a pretty steady paycheck.

Sean Collier: I think consistency is going to be a problem, as these films seem to hit and miss with little pattern. Clearly Perry's best move is continuing to release films on slightly off weekends, as he seems to clean up when the competition is light. It's already worked twice this year, and it should be his M.O. for 2010. If he keeps that up, they'll keep making money indefinitely.

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