With “Pinocchio” and the 2022 Netflix horror-anthology series “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” the director joins a long line of auteurs, from Alfred Hitchcock to Tim Burton, whose presence not merely above the title but in it serves as a stylistic marker, even when it’s not strictly their hand guiding the material.
(The horror godhead Wes Craven habitually did the same; see “Wes Craven’s New Nightmare.”) Few, though, can claim to be the one-man industry that is Tyler Perry, who retains full ownership of the projects produced under his personal shingle at his stand-alone studio in Atlanta.
The multihyphenate creator has famously put his signature on several movie and television titles released under its umbrella — including “Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming,” the most recent iteration of the reliably raucous comedies that he also writes and stars in as a salty, well-cushioned matriarch of a certain age.
While Madea is Perry’s wholesale creation, indubitably linked to the man who wears her wig onscreen, certain intellectual properties with roots that reach back centuries have tilted their brims instead toward a more literal (and literary) acknowledgment of the source.
Neither he nor Christie is officially billed in the title.