Tyler Perry said he will never marry, and he tied that decision to one thing: divorce. Speaking on The Jennifer Hudson Show, Perry said the problem is not marriage itself but the financial damage he believes can come with ending one.
That is why the search around Tyler Perry Moving To Puerto Rico is landing now. Perry’s comments came in a new on-air interview, and they drew attention because he was unusually direct about money, marriage and freedom in the same breath.
“It’s not the marriage that bothers me, it’s the divorce,” Perry said. He added that “everybody that I know that did well and went broke, it was because of a divorce,” before saying, “So I’m good just being free.”
The force of that answer comes from who said it. Perry has spent nearly twenty years making films about marriage, including Why Did I Get Married? in 2007 and Why Did I Get Married Too? in 2010, while making clear he does not intend to walk into the same commitment himself.
That contradiction is part of the appeal of the story, but it also points to the scale of what Perry has built. He owns his entire catalogue of films, television series and stage plays outright, financed his early work himself, and refused to give up master rights. He also owns Tyler Perry Studios, a 330-acre facility in Atlanta built on a former army base.
Perry’s caution is easier to understand against that backdrop. He was homeless in his twenties, staged his early plays to near-empty theatres for six years before one succeeded, and then built a business model designed to keep control in his own hands. If divorce is the risk he sees, it is because the fortune at stake is not abstract; it is concentrated in assets he says he owns outright.
Why Did I Get Married Again? is streaming on Netflix now, which keeps Perry’s long-running marriage themes in view even as he rejects marriage for himself. The closer question is not whether he has changed his mind; it is whether someone who built his empire by protecting ownership will ever see marriage as worth the financial exposure.
