For a film critic, it’s a humbling experience to call up Reuben Cannon, the producer who’s worked side by side with the one-man entertainment brand, Tyler Perry, to create a library of immensely popular and profitable television shows and motion pictures — nearly all of which have been dismissed by the critical community.

It doesn’t take long for Mr. Cannon to acknowledge the irony of our conversation, and to bluntly assert that, amid the hundreds of millions of dollars that have rolled in during the past three years, he couldn’t care less about this critical consensus.

“When the first movie opened, it got 90% negative reviews, and it was clear that the critics just didn’t get it,” he said of Mr. Perry’s 2005 feature debut, “Diary of a Mad Black Woman.” “And many people in the industry didn’t really get it either — the relationship that had been built up over the years. People talk about the Disney brand. Well, Tyler Perry’s name is a trusted brand name across this country, and audiences know that they are going to get something special.”

Indeed, while Mr. Perry — whose latest project, “Meet the Browns,” arrives in theaters next Friday — introduced himself to the national audience with “Diary of a Mad Black Woman,” he was already well-known to the viewers who made it an immediate hit upon its release. At that point, he was the 36-year-old owner of a successful theater company that tours the country and caters to black audiences.

The whopping ratio of slight mainstream notice to big ticket sales for “Diary” left more than a few pundits scratching their heads, wondering where this wave of audience enthusiasm had come from. Roger Ebert, clearly startled by a tsunami of reaction to his initial review, issued an unprecedented follow-up to his regular Friday column. “Well, now I know who Tyler Perry is,” Mr. Ebert wrote. “Last Friday, I published a negative one-star review of ‘Diary of a Mad Black Woman,’ and since then I have received more e-mails than about any review I have ever written.”

All things considered, no filmmaker today operates as successfully outside the Hollywood bubble as does Mr. Perry, who once said, “I know my audience, and they’re not people that the studios know anything about.”

“Every time the crowds come out, people in the industry seem surprised,” Mr. Cannon said. “By now, after all this success, the business worlds get it, and Tyler’s fans clearly get it, but Hollywood still seems caught off guard. Right after ‘Why Did I Get Married?’ [Mr. Perry’s 2007 film] opened, we got called by a trade magazine, and we were asked, ‘Are you suffering from surprise fatigue?’ And I said, ‘No, we’ve just stopped caring about all that. We don’t care about being part of the Hollywood conversation.’ While they’re doing lunch and worrying about their popularity, we’re here [in Atlanta] working — filming television shows, making movies, thinking of new ideas.”

To some degree, the numbers speak for themselves. After the $50 million take of “Diary,” Mr. Perry returned with the $63 million “Madea’s Family Reunion,” the $31 million “Daddy’s Little Girls,” and last year’s $55 million hit “Why Did I Get Married?,” which gave top billing to singer-turned-actress Janet Jackson. In the case of “Married,” its $21 million opening weekend was almost double that of the George Clooney vehicle “Michael Clayton,” which opened the same weekend.

“If you look at the papers and magazines from that week, you’ll see plenty of stories talking about George Clooney but almost nothing about Tyler Perry,” the film critic Elvis Mitchell said during an interview at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “There’s obviously something out of balance there, where all the attention is going to a movie that’s only being seen by half as many people.”

Then again, for Mr. Perry, it’s never been about impressing anyone but his fans. For the most part, Lionsgate has stopped screening Mr. Perry’s films for reviewers altogether, and while the expectations are high for “Meet the Browns” — about an unlikely family reunion in Georgia brought about by a funeral — there’s little question that, boom or bust, Mr. Perry will be back on the big screen in short order.

Mr. Cannon attributes the loyalty of Mr. Perry’s audience to the grassroots perseverance that has brought the actor face-to-face with so many of his fans. For seven years, Mr. Perry blazed his trail on the stage, writing and starring in an array of plays that toured the country and swept up an audience that connected intimately with his stories of black families. Central to Mr. Perry’s material is an interactive approach that encourages audience participation (similar to what one might see in an African-American church) and a recurring central character named Mabel “Madea” Simmons, who is played by Mr. Perry in drag. Madea is a feisty, fiery, loud-and-proud woman in middle age based on Mr. Perry’s mother and aunt. Madea is known to blurt out what Mr. Perry’s more refined characters would not, but even she is now too popular to be left alone. Last month, Mr. Perry announced that he will develop the character into a children’s cartoon.

The transition to television should be a smooth one. Mr. Perry created the TBS series “House of Payne,” which enjoyed record-breaking ratings during its debut on cable last year. He also penned the best-selling novel “Don’t Make a Black Woman Take Off Her Earrings.” Now there’s even talk of launching an entire Tyler Perry television network.

Surveying Mr. Perry’s portfolio, it’s no surprise that his production company is planning to expand to a new, 30-acre facility on the outskirts of Atlanta. (In 2006, Business Week magazine wrote that he was a more profitable celebrity than Adam Sandler, Tom Hanks, or Tom Cruise.) “But this is what he does, he’s just constantly reaching out and building relationships with the average person,” Mr. Cannon said. “He’s not sitting in a boardroom; he’s getting it done. So now you have these films and TV shows that are essentially critic-proof. And his fans, they know the score. Who are you going to believe, these critics or Tyler Perry?”

ssnyder@nysun.com