America’s favorite grandmother is back and badder than ever, “braless and lawless.” Netflix dropped the trailer Wednesday for Tyler Perry’s “A Madea Homecoming,” the 12th installment in the iconic franchise.
“Black don’t crack… unless you’re using it,” Madea says in the trailer for the film, which will center around her great-grandson’s college graduation, where hidden secrets and family drama threaten to ruin the celebratory reunion. The movie streams on Feb. 25.
Perry was planning to retire his gray wig after 2019’s “A Madea Family Funeral” and his 2020 live “Farewell Play Tour,” but changed his mind after the pandemic hit.
He told Variety in 2020, “I was done with Madea, completely done with it … But as I’ve been looking at the state of the world — and I finished a tour in January, just before the pandemic started to break in the country — and the amount of joy and laughter that it brought to so many people, that’s what I think is missing. We need that laughter and that joy.”
The film is the first Madea installment to premiere on Netflix. Since 2005, the franchise has grossed more than $670 million at the box office, according to Forbes. But the collaboration is not Perry’s first with the streaming service — “A Madea Homecoming” follows his 2020 film, “A Fall From Grace,” which reached 39 million households on Netflix in its first month, and will be joined by his upcoming project, “A Jazzman’s Blues.”
“A Madea Homecoming” was shot last summer entirely at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta, Ga., with a budget of more than $20 million. Perry has gotten creative with promotion for the film, creating spoofs of posters for other Netflix projects, including “The Crown,” which he dubbed “The Frown,” and, of course, Beyoncé’s “Homecoming,” which Perry rewrote to say “Homegoing,” captioning the post: “I want to thank my incredible Moth-hive.”
The returning cast for the film includes Tamela Mann as Cora, David Mann as Mr. Brown and Cassi Davis Patton as Aunt Bam. “Homecoming” will also include a guest appearance from Brendan O’Carroll as Agnes Brown. Perry has been playing Madea since 1999, when he first debuted the character in his play, “I Can Do Bad All by Myself.”
Check out the trailer below.