50 Cent wants you to hold off on the Tyler Perry comparisons.
On Wednesday, the 48-year-old rapper turned media mogul shared the exterior renderings of his upcoming G-Unit Studios. The production studio, which will be headquartered in downtown Shreveport, Louisiana, is said to house future film and television projects Fif will be working on through his G-Unit Film & TV company.
The announcement of 50's 956,000 square feet studio understandably drew comparisons to Perry’s 330-acre studio property in Atlanta, Georgia.
“Dude lowkey becoming the Male Tyler Perry it’s crazy to see,” wrote a user on X.
Fifty shared the tweet to his Instagram account and added a highlight under the world “male,” along with the caption, “LOL 😆 Yall better stop playing, Tyler will fuck yall up he ain’t no sucker. Don’t get it fucked up now !”
Although Perry is widely known for his iconic Madea character, calling 50 the “male Tyler Perry” can be interpreted a few different ways. Did the user make a slip or was this intentionally-placed shade towards the filmmaker? This writer invites you to interrogate that comment for yourself.
In February, Perry announced that he was backtracking an $800 million studio expansion after the launch of OpenAI’s new generative text-to-video product, Sora, which is capable of generating cinematic-quality video from written prompts.
“I was in the middle of, and have been planning for the last four years, about an $800 million expansion at the studio, which would’ve increased the backlot a tremendous size — we were adding 12 more soundstages,” Perry told the Hollywood Reporter at the time.
“All of that is currently and indefinitely on hold because of Sora and what I’m seeing. I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it’s able to do. It’s shocking to me.”
He continued, "I no longer would have to travel to locations. If I wanted to be in the snow in Colorado, it’s text. If I wanted to write a scene on the moon, it’s text, and this AI can generate it like nothing. If I wanted to have two people in the living room in the mountains, I don’t have to build a set in the mountains, I don’t have to put a set on my lot. I can sit in an office and do this with a computer, which is shocking to me."
