Tyler Perry Has No Plans to Make a Superhero Movie

Add Tyler Perry to the list of filmmakers not interested in directing a superhero movie.

“You’ve got to have a passion for it. I’m not a big superhero person,” the prolific multi-hyphenate told me at the Los Angeles premiere of his new WWII epic, “The Six Triple Eight.” “They’ve never been something that I enjoy.”

However, Perry said, “my son enjoys them, so we watch them together.”

Perry has created dozens of movie, television and stage projects in his decades-spanning career. His latest, “The Six Triple Eight,” is arguably his largest scale production yet. The Netflix film, starring Kerry Washington with a cameo by Oprah Winfrey, tells the story of the only all-Black female U.S. Army unit to serve overseas during WWII.

Perry also shared that he’s currently writing a Christmas movie – “It’s going to have a lot of gospel music” — but revealed that he wasn’t sure what his moviemaking future would be after he completed his passion project, 2022’s “A Jazzman’s Blues.”

“‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ was the first thing I wrote. It took me 27 years to make it,” Perry said. “Once I made it, I felt like I’ve done it, I’m good. I kind of lost that drive for the next thing.”

But then he was pitched “The Six Triple Eight.”

“I was embarrassed that I didn’t know the story,” Perry said. “There were 855 Black women in World War II and nobody knew it? But I found out one of the reasons was because a lot of the women came back from the war and were ashamed. What they were hearing was that people thought they were sent over to be concubines for Black soldiers because there were white soldiers who were upset that Black soldiers were dating European women. So they thought that was why all these women were over there just for that reason, and it wasn’t that way.”

MORE: Tyler Perry on Directing Oprah Winfrey for the First Time in ‘The Six Triple Eight’: ‘I Wanted to Find Something Worthy of Her’

The film begins with the real-life love story of Black high school senior Lena Derriecott King (Ebony Obsidian) and her Jewish suitor Abram David (Greg Sulkin). Abram proposes to Lena before he leaves for the war, but he dies in combat. Lena enlists and joins the 6888 after learning of his death.

In Variety chief film critic Peter Debruge’s review of the movie, he wrote that the film is Perry’s “best and most substantial feature to date.”

“It’s all overwhelming in the best way possible,” Obsidian said on the carpet. “It’s more than I could have ever wished for. I feel like we are honoring these women tonight. It’s not about me, it’s about the 6888 and what they went through. I got to be a part of something that I had the privilege to join.”

Check out more photos from the “Six Triple Eight” premiere below.