Originally posted Friday, November 22, 2019 by RODNEY HO/rho@ajc.com on his AJC Radio & TV Talk blog
UPDATED: The COVID-19 pandemic delayed plans for a tour indefinitely. No new start date has been announced as of July 27, 2021.
Last month, Tyler Perry expressed a desire in interviews to open his sprawling 330-acre studio to public tours.
Today, Tyler Perry Studios announced on social media that this indeed will come to fruition some time in 2020.
Pricing, frequency and launch date will come later.
His studio is by far the largest in Georgia and in terms of acreage, bigger than any of the studios in Los Angeles.
Besides his 12 sound stages, he’ll be able to show off back lots featuring retail shops, a baseball field, a jail, a trailer park, a four-sided mansion and a duplicate White House.
There are also historic buildings from the time it was Fort McPherson, an army base. He purchased the property in 2015 for $30 million and has invested more than $250 million into the site with more to come.
This could become a popular tourist site on top of places such as the Georgia Aquarium, Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park and the Coca-Cola Museum.
For comparison, in Los Angeles, Sony Pictures Studios offers tours Monday through Friday four times a day for $50 per person. VIP tours are priced at $175 apiece. A more modest "coffee tour" is $135 per person.
A Paramount Studios two-hour tour is $60 apiece seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. (The 4.5-hour VIP tour is $189 per person which includes lunch and greater access to behind-the-scenes areas.) The Warner Brothers studio tour starts at $69 per person and runs up to 14 a day. There is a “classics’ version at the same price and a deluxe $295 tour.
