$22 million might get Hollywood’s attention

How much money does a guy have to mint before he gets some respect around Hollywood?

That’s the question buzzing around town in the wake of “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?” $22-million-dollar opening weekend, just the latest in a string of No. 1 openings for the 38-year old actor-writer-director.

The Atlanta-based artist-entrepreneur and his Christian African American marriage dramedy knocked out the recent efforts from George Clooney, the Rock, Cate Blanchett and Joaquin Phoenix. That’s worth noting because there’s a long list of Hollywood stars who get paid far more upfront than Perry – and whose salaries would consume more than the entire budget of his oeuvre.

Not that Perry’s suffering, with proceeds from a bestselling book, stage plays and the $200 million TBS shelled out to make his cable sitcom “House of Payne.”

Still the core audience for Perry’s vision of upscale black life is not the go-to demographic for Hollywood moguls – the young white male – but African American women.

According to Lionsgate, which released the film, about 90% of the audience for “Why Did I Get Married” was African American. The film was also the best reviewed of Perry’s career, although some of the reviews (as in this paper) were mere inches in length.

Ken Sunshine, the veteran public relations expert who represents Perry (along with Leonardo DiCaprio) says he got a lot of calls Monday morning from “major television outlets who I could not interest in covering him in the last year.”

Going forward, Sunshine says, “I don’t think it’s going to be difficult.”

Perry has been fairly straightforward about the disdain he holds for the mainstream white-run studio system, telling Entertainment Weekly recently that no one’s showering roles on him. He said he even went to visit a studio chief recently and was told, “So who are you now and what do you do?”

That’s an even more shocking pronouncement when one realizes Perry has opened three films for more than $20 million apiece on his appeal alone. Perry has also made sure to work the branding angle ferociously. Taking a lesson from his friend and mentor Oprah Winfrey, Perry has taken great notes to label every piece of his empire with the Tyler Perry moniker, just like Nike or Apple does with sneakers and computers.

Hollywood has also been wary about working with Perry in part because of the total control he demands for each project, and the fact that his films have limited foreign appeal. (Generally speaking, international box office brings in more than half the revenue for most films.) Still his relatively low profile is surprising when one considers the adulation Hollywood showers on, let’s say, Adam Sandler, a mainstream yuppie comic whose foreign appeal is weak. Sandler’s recent film, “I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry” earned $119 million at the domestic box office, which is probably more than “Why Did I Get Married?” will earn. (Perry’s top-grosser “Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion garnered only $63 million domestically.) But Sandler’s film also cost, according to Boxofficemojo.com, some $85 million to produce, at least $75 million more than any Tyler Perry film.

rachel.abramowitz@latimes.

com