The fluorescent hum of a hospital room, the beep of machines like a dirge for the dying. Horace Bellarie, the iron-fisted patriarch of the Bellarie beauty empire, lies pale and broken, tubes snaking from his arms like traitorous vines. His sons—Roy and Charles—hover like vultures, eyes gleaming with the cold calculus of inheritance. “He’s gone,” whispers the doctor, pulling the sheet over his face. Cut to black. Funeral bells toll. The family scatters ashes into the Chattahoochee, toasting to “new beginnings” with champagne flutes that clink like shackles breaking. Kimmie Bellarie—once Kimmie Monroe, the Chicago club dancer who clawed her way into this gilded cage—stands alone on the widow’s walk, her silhouette sharp against a blood-red sunset. Tears? None. Just a flicker in her eye: not grief, but gears turning. The empire is hers now, or so they think.

But what if I told you Horace isn’t dead? What if the grizzled tycoon, whispered to be on death’s door from a mysterious “complication” in his cancer battle, has clawed his way back from the brink—not with a miracle cure, but with a vendetta forged in the fires of betrayal? And what if his street-smart queen, Kimmie, isn’t the pawn they buried him with, but the blade he’s sharpening for the ultimate family purge? Prime Video’s Beauty in Black Season 2, the Tyler Perry juggernaut that redefined soapy drama with its raw fusion of glamour and grit, drops its explosive mid-season trailer today—and it’s not just a comeback; it’s a coronation in carnage. Horace rises stronger, secrets unearthed from buried ledgers, and Kimmie evolves from underdog to unholy alliance. No mercy for the greedy heirs. Just cold-blooded justice from the inside out. Who’s surviving the purge? Hit play on that trailer link below, because in the Bellarie world, resurrection isn’t redemption—it’s revenge.

If Season 1 of Beauty in Black was the slow simmer of a pot about to boil over—grossing 150 million hours viewed on Netflix in its first month, outpacing even Perry’s The Six Triple Eight—then Season 2 is the lid blasting off, steam scalding everyone in reach. Premiering in two blistering parts (Episodes 9-16 on January 9, 2026, followed by 17-24 on February 13), the sophomore run picks up mere weeks after that gut-wrenching finale: Horace’s “death,” Kimmie’s ascension as the unexpected widow-heiress, and a family fractured by whispers of foul play. But Perry, the maestro of moral mazes who built a billion-dollar empire on Black women’s unapologetic fury, isn’t content with pat resolutions. No, he’s resurrecting the king himself—Ricco Ross’s Horace Bellarie, the cosmetics colossus whose Beauty in Black line dominates shelves from Macy’s to high-end spas—via a plot twist that feels ripped from a fever dream: experimental treatments in a Swiss clinic, hidden from his scheming kin, funded by offshore accounts that could topple them all.

The trailer opens with a gut-punch montage: Flashbacks to Horace’s “funeral,” where daughter-in-law Mallory (Crystle Stewart, all Botox smiles and backroom daggers) toasts, “To Horace—and the future we build without him.” Cut to Kimmie (Taylor Polidore Williams, her eyes hardening from wide-eyed ingenue to diamond-edged dominatrix) in the boardroom, slamming a gavel: “This empire isn’t yours to carve up. It’s mine.” The room erupts—Roy (Julian Horton) lunging across the table, Charles (Steven G. Norfleet) hissing threats, ex-wife Olivia (Debbi Morgan, regal venom in every syllable) murmuring, “You’ll never be one of us.” But then—the music swells from mournful strings to a pounding hip-hop beat laced with orchestral thunder—and the doors burst open. There stands Horace, gaunt but unbowed, his signature fedora tilted like a crown of thorns. “Miss me?” he growls, voice like gravel under tires. The trailer freezes on shocked faces: Kimmie’s flicker of triumph, Mallory’s mask cracking into horror. “I didn’t die,” Horace continues, stepping forward as shadows swallow the light. “I evolved. And now? We burn the rot from the roots.”

From there, it’s a 2:45 fever dream of forbidden alliances and familial free-for-alls. Kimmie, no longer the outsider scraping by in Chicago’s underbelly, has transformed: Power suits hugging her curves like armor, her once-vulnerable gaze now a weapon that disarms boardrooms and bedrooms alike. But resurrection demands a reckoning. Horace’s “miracle cure”—a cocktail of black-market gene therapy and rage-fueled rehab—comes with strings: Buried ledgers unearthed from Swiss vaults, revealing embezzlement by Roy (siphoning funds for a side hustle in counterfeit cosmetics) and secret trysts that could shatter Charles’s marriage. “You thought you buried me to inherit,” Horace snarls in a dimly lit study, ledger in hand, flames licking the edges of incriminating photos. “But I buried your sins first.” The trailer’s pulse quickens: Quick-cuts of midnight meetings where Horace and Kimmie pore over documents by candlelight, her fingers tracing his scars—both literal from surgery, metaphorical from betrayal. “They took everything from you,” he whispers, their faces inches apart, tension crackling like static. “Now we take it back. Together.”

Perry’s genius lies in flipping the script on the “trophy wife” trope. Kimmie isn’t arm candy; she’s the arsenic in the champagne. Williams, 28 and a revelation after her breakout in Waves (2021), channels a queen’s quiet storm—her Chicago grit honed into Atlanta steel. In one trailer highlight, she faces off with Olivia in a sun-drenched conservatory, orchids wilting under the heat of their words: “You clawed your way in on his deathbed,” Olivia spits. Kimmie leans in, smile serpentine: “And I’ll claw my way out on yours.” The line lands like a guillotine, applause erupting from test audiences who dubbed it “instant meme gold.” But beneath the bravado? Vulnerability. Flashbacks show Kimmie’s pre-Bellarie life: Pole-dancing under neon haze, sister Angel (Amber Reign Smith) whispering dreams of escape. Now, as Horace’s partner in purge, she’s torn—loyalty to her street roots clashing with the empire’s seductive pull. “Power changes you,” she confesses to Jules (Charles Malik Whitfield), her ex-boss turned conflicted confidant, in a rain-slicked parking garage. “But does it free you… or just chain you tighter?”

The heirs? Cannon fodder in this familial Thunderdome. Roy, the hot-headed eldest, spirals into paranoia, his trailer scenes a frenzy of frantic calls and smashed whiskey glasses: “Dad’s a ghost now—haunting us for sport!” Horton, channeling his Bel-Air menace, sells the unraveling with sweat-slick intensity. Charles, the “golden boy” lawyer, masks his panic with polished charm, but Norfleet’s micro-expressions betray the cracks—especially in a steamy subplot where he beds Sofia (newcomer Valentina Lodovini), a sultry Italian perfumer gunning for Kimmie’s throne. “She’s playing you like a violin,” Kimmie warns him in a gala gown that hugs like a threat. Their confrontation—mirrors shattering behind them—ends with Charles on his knees: “What do you want from me?” Her reply, whispered like a curse: “Everything you stole.” Mallory, the viper in Versace, escalates from schemer to saboteur, her alliance with Norman (Richard Lawson, all silver-fox slyness) plotting a corporate coup that could flood the market with knockoffs. Stewart’s Mallory is Perry’s wicked witch perfected—her trailer taunt, “Queens don’t bow; they behead,” delivered over a champagne coup as she eyes Kimmie’s neck, has already spawned 1.2 million TikTok stitches.

And Horace? Ross, 62 and a Perry staple since For Better or Worse, resurrects the tycoon as a phoenix of payback. No frail invalid here—the trailer shows him shadowboxing in a private gym, veins bulging like rivers of rage, his “miracle” leaving him scarred but supercharged. “They mourned me too soon,” he rumbles to Kimmie in their war room—a opulent study wallpapered in faded ledgers—his hand cupping her face with a tenderness that twists the knife. Their partnership? Electric and erotic, a forbidden dance of mentor and minx. One scene has them in a private jet over the Atlantic, turbulence mirroring their turmoil: “You saved me once,” Horace says, fingers tracing her jaw. “Now I save you.” The kiss that follows—slow, searing, shadowed by storm clouds—is the trailer’s hottest hook, proving Perry’s unerring eye for chemistry that simmers before it boils.

Perry’s touch elevates the soapy to Shakespearean. Beauty in Black, his first Netflix original since A Jazzman’s Blues (2022), draws from his own playbook: Black excellence amid white-knuckle stakes, women wielding power like Excalibur. Season 1’s 16-episode binge—split into two eight-episode arcs—explored Kimmie’s rags-to-riches rocket, from club girl ensnared in the Bellaries’ web to reluctant rebel exposing their underbelly. It was a hit: 92% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, praised for “unflinching looks at class warfare in the beauty industry” (The Hollywood Reporter). Season 2 amps the ante, with Perry directing six episodes himself, infusing boardroom battles with The Godfather‘s gravitas and Dynasty‘s dazzle. “This isn’t revenge; it’s reclamation,” Perry told Variety at a December 5 press junket, his eyes alight. “Kimmie and Horace? They’re the underdogs who bite back.”

The trailer’s production values scream prestige: Filmed in Atlanta’s gleaming Peachtree towers and Charleston mansions standing in for Bellarie estates, it’s a feast for the eyes—crisp cinematography by Perry vet Toyomi Kozak capturing the empire’s opulence (marble foyers dripping chandeliers) against Kimmie’s gritty flashbacks (neon-lit poles, rain-slicked streets). Composer Aaron Zigman’s score throbs with hip-hop horns and orchestral swells, while the soundtrack teases bangers from SZA, Megan Thee Stallion, and an exclusive drop from GloRilla over the end credits. Casting coups abound: Guest spots from Taraji P. Henson as a rival mogul and Keith David voicing Horace’s spectral “inner demon” in fever-dream sequences.

Fan frenzy is fever-pitch. Since the trailer’s December 10 drop—teased with cryptic billboards (“The King Rises. The Queen Reigns. The Empire Bleeds.”)—#BeautyInBlackS2 has trended worldwide, amassing 3.4 million posts. TikTok edits mash Horace’s resurrection with The Crow‘s brooding revival, while Reddit’s r/BeautyInBlack theorizes wild: “Horace faked his death to test Kimmie—pass, and she gets the keys; fail, and it’s purge time.” Williams live-tweeted the premiere: “Kimmie’s not surviving the Bellaries anymore. She’s ending them. 💅🔥” Ross, ever the showman, posted a cryptic IG: “From grave to grace. Who’s ready for the reckoning?”

Critics’ early peeks? Raves. A THR screener called it “Perry’s Succession with soul—Kimmie’s arc is a masterclass in weaponized vulnerability.” Empire dubbed the Horace-Kimmie duo “the most intoxicating power couple since Omari and Ghost.” With a £40 million budget—up 60% from Season 1—Prime Video eyes franchise longevity: Whispers of Beauty in Black: Empire of Ashes for 2027, spinning off Roy’s counterfeit ring.

Yet amid the glamour, Perry weaves thorns: The beauty industry’s dark underbelly—exploited labor, colorism scandals—mirrors real-world reckonings, with Kimmie’s rise a rallying cry for Black women reclaiming spaces. “She’s every sister who smiled through the shade,” Williams said. As Horace claws back, purging the poison, one question lingers: In this empire of illusions, who wears the real crown?

The trailer ends on a killer close: Kimmie and Horace, back-to-back in a rain-lashed penthouse, knives drawn—not at each other, but the shadows closing in. “They buried us once,” Horace growls. Kimmie smirks: “Now we bury them.” Fade to black. Empire crumbles. Who’s left standing?

Stream the trailer now—because in Beauty in Black, resurrection isn’t a gift. It’s a grenade. And the pin’s already pulled.