Franchise Fixations is a recurring column by Will Ashton that digs beneath the surface of today’s latest franchise films—unpacking what they add, subtract, or accidentally reveal about the ever-growing universes they inhabit. Sometimes it’s praise, sometimes it’s therapy. Always, it’s personal.
As of July 2025, there are fourteen Madea movies in existence. That is, assuming you count her cameo in 2008’s Meet the Browns and the animated 2015 direct-to-DVD movie, Madea’s Tough Love, which I do. Ever since Tyler Perry’s most iconic stage and screen creation was born in the late ‘90s, Mabel “Madea” Earlene Simmons has been one of the most propulsive, recurring, and defining characters of the early 21st century. I like to think that these are the thoughtful reasons why I continue to subject myself to the films based on this prolific personality, including the most recent installment, Madea’s Destination Wedding, which is streaming exclusively on Netflix. But, in truth, the reason is a little deeper, a little weirder, and maybe, just maybe, a little sadder.
Let’s dive into it.
As someone with a column called Franchise Fixations, I should have you know that, yes, I have watched every film with Madea. Did I like any of them? Not really. Have I outright hated a few? Of course. So, why do I do it? If I am to explain the method of this madness, which is quite a fool’s errand, I would tell you (as I have told others who are, no doubt, curious) that the reason relates to how Madea has become one of the most progressive and regressive characters and caricatures of this modern era.
She is almost single-handedly the character that allowed Perry, a man who battled homelessness and debt, to become one of the richest people on the planet. She is the reason Perry owns a portion of Atlanta. She is the reason why Perry has built his own media empire that allows him to give back to the community and provide jobs and opportunities for Black actors and artists throughout the country. Maybe even the world. Madea paved the way for a brighter, more inclusive entertainment ecosystem. She hasn’t solved racism or cured any long-standing systemic ills, but she let Perry make a name for himself a billion times over.
Madea is also, to put it quite bluntly, a modern-day minstrel character who relies on extremely prejudiced and outdated stereotypes to get quick, cheap, and dirty laughs from undemanding audiences—many of whom are white, and many of them almost certainly laughing for all the wrong reasons. And not only are they laughing for the wrong reasons, they’re encouraged to! Perry would claim that he’s the next evolution of Eddie Murphy, but he owes about as much to Amos & Andrew as he does some of the most bankable, revered Black artists in entertainment.
For every three steps that Perry takes toward social justice, he also takes four steps back. It’s progress and repression on equal footing. It’s fascinating, and I can’t help but marvel at it. There are over a dozen Madea movies, and I still can’t fit a square peg in this cross-dressing hole. So I can only gawk at the audacity and incongruity of it all. There are truly few things like it.
(I would also be remiss if I didn’t give a shoutout to Spill.com, now Double Toasted, which has been a great fuel to the fire of my Madea/Tyler Perry fascination and a great source of laughter amid the confusing ordeal that has been the filmmaker’s long, strange, and bewildering career.)
By now, Madea has gone to jail, gone into witness protection, hosted a family reunion and a family funeral, had a big happy family, celebrated Christmas, Homecoming, and Halloween (the latter, twice), and done bad all by herself (not really, but I couldn’t think of a better way to end that sentence). Those are only the focus of a handful of her movies. Madea has basically done everything but fly to the moon, and I wouldn’t put it past Perry to try. So now, it’s time for her and her ne’er-do-well friends and family members to go on a destination wedding in the Bahamas.
To try to detail this plot would be about as moronic as the characters at the forefront of this streaming movie because it doesn’t have one. It barely has a logline’s worth of material. It’s a nearly two-hour exercise in tired and aimless improv, the sort of listless screen patting that’s become extremely commonplace in Perry’s work in this persistent cinematic universe of sorts.
If you go back and look at the writer-director-producer-star’s quotes during the press rounds for 2019’s Madea Family Funeral, it was evident that he was done with this character. He had done everything he wanted to do or could think to do. He was ready to move on. Like many people, Perry fancies himself an artist, and he can be a half-decent storyteller at times. The Family That Preys and the aforementioned I Can Do Bad All By Myself showed early promise for Perry as a budding director at the time. 2010’s For Colored Girls, while not especially good, did show how Perry could become a brazen, more risk-friendly director if he were allowed to take big swings. And, more recently, Netflix’s underseen A Jazzman’s Blues showed Perry making a softer, more elegant production that doesn’t align with his more sitcom-friendly style of film and TV-making.
But those movies—quality aside—are Perry’s attempts at making art. Much like 2024’s earnest but misbegotten The Six Triple Eight, which became Perry’s first Oscar-nominated film (albeit for Best Original Song, but still), there are moments in Perry’s industrious career where he wants to swell the souls of the masses. He has clear desires to push himself as a storyteller and be recognized as an artisan. But whenever he needs to make films like his latest, Madea’s Destination Wedding, Perry is strictly a man of commerce.
Whether he makes them to fulfill Netflix’s contractual obligations, to get funding for his more serious endeavors, or to simply make movies that people are guaranteed to watch, or some other dark, soulless purpose, Perry continues to return to the dry well of Madea. It doesn’t matter that he has nothing left to say. He doesn’t care that he’s totally out of ideas. These movies are simply business ventures, made in the cynical interest of appealing to shareholders and the mindless masses who keep watching them (like me!) no matter how awful they become. And believe me, they are bad now. Really, really bad. Which is saying something since, all things considered, they were never good, really.
The early Madea movies, including Diary of a Mad Woman (the only live-action installment that he didn’t direct), featured Madea modestly but purposefully. She was there to give Perry’s shrill melodrama an extra boost of theatricality. Madea was always good for livening the proceedings. She spoke honestly and unabashedly. She would do or say the things that the other, more moral characters were afraid to say to their conspiring lovers or deceitful and unfaithful men. Madea was not the focus, necessarily (even when her name was in the title), but she was undeniably the draw. Audiences would indulge Perry’s overworked melodramatics because they knew that Madea’s unsparing hysterics were just around the corner, waiting to turn fickle fellas into fools.
Madea could be moralizing and mean-spirited, but she told it how it was, and people loved her for it. But a little Madea goes a long way. While it was a given that Perry would take the Ernest route and make her the sole focus of her own movies, it was evident that such a change would not be in the best interest of this cantankerous character. Indeed, the later sequels (?) such as A Madea Christmas, Madea’s Witness Protection, and the Boo! A Madea Halloween features are stifled by the need to keep Madea at the forefront of the action. She can be an attention-keeping character, and, to Perry’s credit, the actor disappears in the role, but there’s only so much you can do with her.
She’ll mispronounce every word in the English dictionary, cause havoc on any mischievous soul who tries to do her wrong, and do whatever it takes to get in her way—often in an outlandishly violent way, despite all her god-fearing—but she still needs to fill out an hour of the runtime, and despite her persistently expanding family tree providing fuel for the fire, she can only repeat this route so many times before even Perry finds the whole formula a bit stale.
Despite being a consistent moneymaker, at least until the surprisingly unsuccessful Boo! 2: A Madea Halloween, Perry knew in 2019 that it was time to give Madea a rest with the sneakily deceiving title, A Madea Family Funeral. (Madea is hosting the funeral, you see, not the corpse in question). To Perry’s mild credit, that was the last time that Madea graced the silver screen, but it wasn’t the end of her run. After a few short years, Netflix brought her back to the forefront with 2022’s A Madea Homecoming, which was quite easily the most rambunctious and the most indifferent of the Madea-centered movies to date.
The plot was entirely convoluted. The “story” was pure nonsense; everyone is there in the service of Netflix overlords. But more importantly, their sweet, sweet Red Lobster checks as well (an extended sequence in this chain restaurant makes it clear where priorities lie). Despite being an objectively horrible movie, though, you can see that Perry was having fun reprising the role. There were a few inspired set pieces, namely one with Rosa Parks, of all people, and it felt more uproarious in nature than the tired likes of the last few installments. That didn’t make it good, of course. Far from it. But it showed that if Madea were to live on, the titular character would give even fewer flying f***s than ever before.
That brings us back to Madea’s Destination Wedding. It’s hard to rank these movies in any real sense. But I’d be pressed to say that this is the worst of the bunch, which is saying something. If there was even an inkling of inspiration to be found in any of the recent Madea movies, that has been officially and resiliently squashed. Madea’s Destination Wedding isn’t a film. That’s not me being mean. This streaming title is simply a stream of heavily improved, overlong scenes that are quite loosely in the service of telling the story of how Madea and her family are going on a destination wedding in the Bahamas for the quick-to-be-hitched daughter of the long-suffering Brian (also played by Perry).
There’s no forward momentum. There’s no desire to tell a clear or concrete story. It’s not even trying that hard to be all that amusing. Everything is a persistently half-assed effort to push out a product that can be called a Madea movie and call it a lazy day. It’s not like these movies were ever meant to be high art, I know. But c’mon, man. At least try!
It’s not like we, the audience, are demanding much. Just a few quick bits of anarchic goofiness. You get that, I guess, here. But it’s all without care or purpose. There’s nothing here that seems even the least bit conceived from an honest or genuine place of fun or playfulness. Actually, I’d be surprised if there was even an outline of a script. This film feels like it was cobbled together by half-hearted riffing and a ChatGPT rundown of a generic Madea film under Perry’s free trial.
Only David Mann, a consummate professional, reprising his role as the scaredy-cat Mr. Brown, is trying to give an actual performance. Everyone else begrudgingly goes through the motions. They’re doing what they need to do to get a free paid vacation from Netflix. Much like how Perry was a decade late in capitalizing on the ’80s/’90s multi-character brawdy Eddie Murphy farces, he’s now making his Happy Madison 2010s buddy comedies for the streaming era of the fraught 2020s.
There’s an almost spiteful indifference to plotting, staging, coordinating, and execution. Perry doesn’t want to put in even the modest effort to make his consumable products. You’d think that someone who goes through hours upon hours of make-up to become these outlandish characters would have more patience, but maybe that’s where it goes. He spends such a long time in a make-up chair—and wears so many production hats—that he has no time for play.
The centerpiece of Madea’s Destination Wedding is a Bahamas resort called Atlantis Paradise Island. Much like there were carefully crafted compositions of Red Lobster’s signature dishes in A Madea Homecoming that looked like Emmanuel Lubezki stepped in for a day’s work in what is otherwise a clumsy shoot, there are several carefully composed exterior drone shots of this big and expansive locale that show where the producer-writer-director-star’s corporate interests are. You can fudge the storytelling details; comedy can be as subjective as you want it to be. But if a sponsor is shelling out money for their overpriced hotel to fund this passive lark of an endeavor, then you better believe that this very half-assed filmmaker will put both of his buttcheeks into it.
It would be disheartening if one had any faith in Perry’s abilities as a filmmaker, at least as far as his comedies go. He might occasionally try to make something worthwhile dramatically (even if, as any Perry fan likely knows, his dramas can often unintentionally be much funnier than any of his vaudeville-esque trifles), but the comedy train has long since left the station.
He’s not even trying to make himself and his friends laugh anymore, it seems. Characters aren’t given any sort of clear character or motivation. Nobody is directed in any sort of way when it comes to improv. The result, then, is often two to four characters speaking nonsense over each other in any given scene in Madea’s Destination Wedding—a disorienting viewing experience that makes you feel like you’re having a stroke any time you try to make sense of what one or more folks are saying.
But that’s on me for even trying as a viewer. Now that Perry is totally in the bank for Netflix, the hack director isn’t even expecting his audience to pay attention to the tomfoolery at play here. If he is, then how can you account for the numerous continuity errors and leaps in logic that make last year’s Superman look like a grounded Sundance dramedy? Are we expected to think that he respects the intelligence of his audience when he drums out convoluted exposition so lazily that deceitful soon-to-be ex-lovers are in the lobby of the hotel, waiting for our lead characters to overhear their misdeeds as they yell about them on the phone? We’re not meant to watch a film like this. It doesn’t matter to Perry if people even enjoy their time here. He’s just making content.
I can’t say that I’m mad about it. Perry might be as close to a self-made billionaire as they come. If he can slum it and get a healthy paycheck in the process, who am I to bemoan it? I just wish that it looked like Perry was having even the smallest bit of fun in this whole vacation of a movie.
Say what you will about the lesser Happy Madison movies. At least it looks like Sandler and his buddies are having a good time! Here, whether the man is adorned in a flowery dress as Madea or he’s basically being himself as Brian, Perry generally looks pretty miserable. Maybe looks are deceiving. Maybe he’s having the time of his life, and the camera—and his loosey-goosey edit—is just not capturing the joy he is feeling.
But the workaholic actor/filmmaker just seems to be too concentrated on defecating out another unfulfilling effort to seem like he’s enjoying this little bit of time in the sun in the Caribbean. What a sad life he must live, now that I think about it. The guy is always so focused on putting stuff out, even films that he couldn’t give a hoot about, that he probably never gets a real moment of bliss during these paid work trips. Does he even have any real friends at this point? Is this how he convinces folks to hang out with him? With Madea?
The only times when Perry perks up at all are when he’s playing the cantankerous Uncle Joe, Madea’s horndog elderly brother, who is the source of Madea’s Destination Wedding‘s few pitiful chuckles. It’s no wonder, then, that Perry went ahead and filmed a spin-off,Joe’s College Road Trip, around the same time that he shot this feature. Who knows when that Netflix feature is set to be finished and released, but it doesn’t matter. It’ll likely be as horrible as Madea’s Destination Wedding, and I will almost surely watch it.
For better or worse, Perry and I will continue to follow suit with our roles in this listless charade. But at least now that they’re Netflix exclusives, I don’t have to put up any appearances whenever I plunk down for his dreck. Alas, that’s a luxury that Perry can’t afford—even when he’s in the world’s sunniest locations, on another person’s dime.
