Tyler Perry

Tyler Perry (born 1969) is an American filmmaker, playwright, and mogul who turned the Madea stage plays into a self-financed entertainment empire. His 330-acre Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta — built on a former Confederate army base — made him the first African American to outright own a major film studio.

The Sora shock

For four years Perry had planned an $800 million expansion adding twelve soundstages to the studio. Then, on February 15, 2024, OpenAI unveiled its text-to-video model Sora. Days later Perry told The Hollywood Reporter the expansion was “currently and indefinitely on hold” — he had seen demonstrations showing that scenes he would once have built sets or traveled to locations for could soon be generated from text.

Unlike peers who dismissed AI’s output, Perry’s warning came from being impressed: he described being stunned by Sora’s capabilities and said he could see the technology touching every corner of the industry, from actors to editors to crew. “A lot of jobs are going to be lost,” he warned in the same round of interviews, urging the industry to approach AI “as a whole” and press for government regulation to protect workers.

The nuance in Perry’s stance is that he is not an abstainer: he acknowledged using AI in two then-upcoming films to avoid hours of aging makeup. His alarm is an employer’s — a man who owns soundstages and payrolls calculating what happens to both when video can be generated — which made his warning land harder in Hollywood than any actor’s manifesto.