Why a zero per cent Rotten Tomatoes score won't stop people from watching Tyler Perry's newest movie

Tyler Perry recently released a new film, Divorce in the Black, on Amazon Prime. Critics have universally panned the movie that follows a religious woman caught up in an abusive marriage — so much so that it received the rare score of zero per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Yet Divorce in the Black has driven more sign-ups to Amazon Prime Video in the U.S. than any other movie produced by the streaming service to date. Culture critic David Dennis Jr. joins Elamin Abdelmahmoud to discuss the criticism and the support behind Tyler Perry's latest movie. 

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: You've seen Divorce in the Black. How'd you feel about it? 

David: It stinks. All you need to know about the movie: there's an 11-minute scene that opens the movie in which they pull a dead body out of a casket during the funeral and load it up to the back of a pickup truck and drive off.

Like, it is a bad movie. It is an earned zero per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. But it's not much worse than most of the Tyler Perry movies we see. Like, this is Tyler Perry fare. There's shoddy camera work. There are some sound issues that are going on there. The plot doesn't totally make sense. The acting is not that great. It seems like a film-school-final-project thing, but this is the Tyler Perry brand. It's just that we have this wild, wild opening scene for 11 minutes that I cannot stop thinking about.

Elamin: There's something that happens when Tyler Perry puts out a movie where people go, "This is a thing that is for me." So maybe before we get into the rest of Tyler Perry's career, what is it that makes this movie typical Tyler Perry fare?

David: There's these two sects of Tyler Perry folks, right? There is the, "I love Tyler Perry" — and we can get into those folks who actually loved him and his art and stuff. And there's people who are like, once the clip of the funeral and them pulling the body out of the casket started trickling down social media, and once the Rotten Tomatoes reviews commenced, people who were like, "I have to see just how bad this movie is."

Tyler Perry's stuff is melodramatic. It's like soap opera-y, but, obviously, he does his own scriptwriting. He doesn't have any editors, he doesn't have anybody to look over it. So there are plot holes in there, there's moments where the camera's off base. It seems like there are things where they did retakes of sound, and it's like they did it in a basement somewhere. There's all of these things that happen that make it part of the spectacle. We watch this stuff to laugh at it, as much as people who watch it to enjoy it.

Elamin: David, I'm going to challenge you to say something good about Tyler Perry's film career. Not necessarily even the films, just something that is positive that has come out of Tyler Perry making as many movies as he has, because he's made so many. 

David: One of the things that Tyler Perry does is that he launches a lot of careers for Black actors, right? And he pays them really well. There are a lot of people who we don't associate necessarily with Tyler Perry, like Idris Elba. 

Elamin: Definitely not.

David: We think about him in The Wire and stuff…. Tyler Perry puts these people in these positions to have these leading movie roles. Daddy's Little Girls was Idris Elba, that was him starring in this movie. He puts these actors in positions to earn a living and he puts a lot of money in their pocket. 

Elamin: I'm going to have to wrestle with the idea that Tyler Perry's responsible for giving me Idris Elba. The question that people ask is: who is this movie for? Do you have an answer for that? 

David: The Tyler Perry movie is for whatever streaming service purchases the Tyler Perry. Amazon Prime has the most subscriptions based on this movie, right? These movies proverbially sell like hotcakes, and he makes this movie with that understanding: that when you get a zero per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, that means that I, David Dennis Jr., I'm going to run to that movie to watch and see why it has a zero per cent. So he's doing that to line their pockets and line his pockets.

When a Tyler Perry movie comes out and I'm out, like at dinner or I'm outside, people are talking about the Tyler Perry movie. All my friends know that there's a movie in which somebody pulls a dead body out of a casket and puts it in the back of the trunk…. Tyler Perry makes watercooler talk-like content, and that is something that a lot of people in the streaming world want. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with David Dennis Jr. produced by Ty Callender.