Malcolm D. Lee, the Girls Trip director who turned Black friendship into box office

Malcolm D. Lee

Photo: Danielle G. Campbell / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 11, 1970 Queens, New York City, United States
Occupation	Film and television director, screenwriter and producer
Known for	Space Jam: A New Legacy, Girls Trip, Night School

Malcolm D. Lee has described his goal in one sentence, and he has kept to it longer than most directors keep to anything: it “has always been to make the so-called African American movie mainstream.” The odd thing about his career is where that ambition paid off. The films that did it were modest ensemble pieces about Black friends arguing over a wedding toast or a weekend in New Orleans. The one that handed him LeBron James, the Looney Tunes and a century of Warner Bros. property, the most mainstream assignment Hollywood had to give, is the one critics liked least.

Filmmaking did not look like an open door when he was a boy in Brooklyn, the son of a schoolteacher and a medical records administrator. What changed it was a lodger. His cousin Spike Lee, thirteen years older, moved into the basement of the family brownstone while he studied film at New York University, and Malcolm started helping on his student shoots. “I didn’t really think that somebody in my family or somebody who was Black could do that,” he told The Hollywood Reporter.

He was born on January 11, 1970, in Queens, and went from the Packer Collegiate Institute to Georgetown University before returning to NYU for a graduate degree in film. By then the apprenticeship was already under way: he did assistant work on his cousin’s Malcolm X in 1992 and on Clockers three years later.

His first feature, The Best Man, came out in October 1999 with Spike’s company, 40 Acres and a Mule, producing and Universal releasing. The story of college friends regrouping before a wedding gave Taye Diggs, Nia Long, Morris Chestnut, Terrence Howard and Sanaa Lathan room to play educated Black professionals with ordinary problems, and it gave Regina Hall her first film role. Lee wanted it as a reply to screen Black men who were, as he put it, “either abusers or misogynists” or stiff figures “checking their Blackness at the door.” It opened at No. 1 with $9 million on the way to about $35 million.

Studios came calling, and his first decisions were guarded. He passed on writing a romantic comedy for Whitney Houston and Will Smith because the producers would not let him direct it. “I’m an auteur. Whatever I write, I’m directing,” he recalled thinking, before conceding it had been “a little shortsighted.” Universal then talked him into Undercover Brother (2002), the Eddie Griffin spy spoof drawn from John Ridley’s animated shorts. Lee hoped for a satire on racism with the bite of the original cartoons; the studio wanted something broader, and the film earned $41.6 million on a $25 million budget. Roll Bounce, a 1970s roller-skating story for Fox Searchlight, followed in 2005, then Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins and Soul Men in 2008.

After a couple of underperformers, “including my own,” executives concluded that “Black movies don’t do well, so don’t make them.” He took stock and asked himself what his brand was. The answer was the film that had launched him. The Best Man Holiday reunited the original cast in 2013 and grossed $72.8 million worldwide on a $17 million budget. Barbershop: The Next Cut came in 2016, and in 2017 Girls Trip, with Regina Hall, Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith and a breakout Tiffany Haddish as four friends at the Essence Festival in New Orleans, became the first comedy of that year to pass $100 million in North America. It won Outstanding Motion Picture at the NAACP Image Awards and earned Lee a first-look deal at Universal. Night School, with Kevin Hart and Haddish, took more than $103 million worldwide in 2018.

The record has a weaker side, and it is not hidden. Scary Movie 5, which he directed in 2013 from a David Zucker and Pat Proft script, was the worst-reviewed and lowest-grossing entry in its series, and Night School made its money over largely negative notices. The sharper test came in July 2019, when Terence Nance left Space Jam: A New Legacy a few weeks into the shoot and Warner Bros. gave Lee four days to take over a production costing more than $120 million. A Knicks fan and self-described basketball purist, he had once waved the idea away: “Bugs Bunny playing basketball? No thank you.” He later described creativity by committee — “Have you seen the number of writers on this movie?” — and learned of the film’s same-day release on HBO Max twenty minutes before the public did. It grossed $164 million in 2021, drew a 25 percent approval score on Rotten Tomatoes and collected three Golden Raspberry Awards. The film tested an assumption his own career had argued against: that placing a Black star inside a studio’s catalogue of characters is the same as making a Black story the main event.

He has done better by staying close to his own material. The Best Man: The Final Chapters, the limited series he created for Peacock in December 2022, became the streamer’s most-watched original at launch and its first title to reach Nielsen’s Top 10. In 2026 he moved into a genre he had never directed with Strung, a psychological thriller written by Alan B. McElroy and produced by Tyler Perry and Jason Blum, starring Chloe Bailey as a violinist who takes a live-in tutoring job with a wealthy family and finds its secrets. It opened the 30th American Black Film Festival on May 27 and arrived on Peacock on June 26.

His company, Blackmaled Productions, is now the vehicle for the rest. In May 2026 it launched “Love & Laughs” with Tribeca Studios and Universal, a one-year program giving up to three emerging filmmakers $50,000 grants to shoot short comedies and romances as proofs of concept, with a Los Angeles premiere planned for 2027. Lee, who is married to Camille Banks and has three sons, has said the father-and-son story at the center of Space Jam: A New Legacy was what he could add, because the narrative about Black fathers “has been so bastardized.”

The next stretch is television drama. In September 2026 Peacock ordered Before I Let Go, an adaptation of Kennedy Ryan’s novel that Lee co-created and co-wrote with her and will direct. In October, Deadline reported that he will direct and executive produce Whiskey Matriarch, an Amazon drama starring Taraji P. Henson. A Girls Trip sequel, which producer Will Packer has said Lee will direct, is still waiting for a start date. If it comes, it will test the claim he has been making since a basement in Brooklyn: that four Black women on a trip are not a niche.

Featured Films

Tags: spike lee, Malcolm D. Lee, Regina Hall, Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Best Man, Girls Trip

Related People

Ang Lee

Mauricio Leal

Shawn Levy

Al Jolson

Yeon Sang-ho

Peter Stormare