Charlotte hires Abigail "Abby" Dexter as COO and determines the company will have to front $25 million to make William's deal viable.

Convinced that they were marital assets, Chris takes the money from the hidden account and pays deposits to start a construction firm with Ben.

Alice tries to persuade Andrea to reconcile with Chris and end her affair, explaining that it will not last and William will never marry her, begging her to stop before her life is destroyed.

Charlotte calls a board meeting and fires William with the support of the Calvary Company, a silent investor revealed to be Alice.

Alice has been receiving financial guidance for years from Nicholas "Nick" Blanchett, a homeless man she frequently fed at her diner.

It eventually earned $37.1 million domestically, making it the second-least successful of Tyler Perry's films ahead of Daddy's Little Girls.

[5] Stephen Holden of The New York Times said: The suds that cascade through [the film] more than equal the cubic footage from nighttime soaps like Dallas, Dynasty and their offspring.

As the movie proceeds, the flow quickens into a surging flood tide of recriminations and reversals in which blows are exchanged, claws bared and tears shed .

[6] The New York Daily News rated the film three out of five stars and commented: Perry's notoriously overstuffed plots have sometimes been top-heavy, but this movie, like Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, hangs on an elegant structure that doesn't feel forced.

[7]Claudia Puig of USA Today said the best thing about the film is the opportunity it affords to watch a pair of veteran actresses still at the top of their game.

Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates play best pals in this soap opera-style story, and the moments each are on-screen are undeniably the movie's best.

[8] Stephen Farber of The Hollywood Reporter observed: Although this interracial Dynasty isn't always believable—it's a stretch to accept the lifelong friendship of the two matriarchs as well as the last-minute business coup that they engineer—there's plenty of action to keep us engrossed.

[9] Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel rated the film two out of five stars and called it Tyler Perry's "most cinematically polished production to date" but also: yet another example of how the mini-mogul from Atlanta is his own worst enemy, raiding his cupboard of his popular but pandering stage plays and not bothering to script doctor them for the screen.

[10] Peter Debruge of Variety said the film "recycles familiar ingredients according to his own unique formula, serving up a lip-smacking, finger-snapping sudser" and added: Perry has a tendency to overload his features, and The Family That Preys is no exception, reflecting the helmer's view that the emotional roller-coaster of life can whip its passengers from outrage to exhilaration, from belly laughs to tears in an instant, making for an exhausting yet cathartic overall experience.

[11] Monika Fabian of Time Out New York said: As with Perry’s other films, his Christian moralistic storytelling can be slightly off-putting—but the solid acting and genuinely entertaining story are sure to satisfy fans, and maybe even bring in some converts.

The characters are amalgams of recognizable types plunked down in sitcom settings that elicit near-Pavlovian responses of cheers, jeers, and tears.

Here and there, Perry throws us a curve ball—an act of physical violence presented as deserved comeuppance or a character's grim and dubiously appropriate endgame—but even these are not jarring enough to derail it.

[14] Brian Orndorf of DVD Talk said: Preys is a soap opera in the most unashamed sense, and while this aesthetic has made Perry heaps of coin, his personal screen touch remains some of the worst overall filmmaking around.

The new feature is perhaps even more melodramatic than anything that's come before, taking the Andrea/William affair and using it as the inspiration for the cast to arch their eyebrows to assured cramp, flare nostrils in unintentional comedic fury, and bounce impassioned lines of dialogue off each other with medicine ball grace.

[15] Gregory Kirschling from Entertainment Weekly stated: Tyler Perry's melodramas have a tendency to skid not only off the counter but out the kitchen and down the hall, too.

Kathy Bates plays the head of an Atlanta construction company where Sanaa Lathan is a snooty exec and her husband (Rockmond Dunbar), for maximum class/race sizzle, is a worker grunt.

Taraji P. Henson won Best Actress at the BET Awards for her role in the film combined with two other performances in Not Easily Broken, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Bonus features include deleted scenes, Two Families, Two Legends, which spotlights stars Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates; Preying in the Big Easy, about filming in New Orleans; Casting the Family, with interviews with the director and cast, and Delving into the Diner, in which production designer Ina Mayhew discusses her concept for the set.