BREAKING: Horace’s DEATH rocks Beauty in Black—Kimmie’s solo reign turns into a blood-soaked throne war! ⚰️

Part 1’s Italy cliffhanger delivers the gut-punch: No miracle cure, just a final gasp that leaves the Bellaries scrambling and Mallory’s venom at full throttle. Secrets explode, bodies drop, and Kimmie’s empire teeters on the edge of total collapse—fans are DEVASTATED over this twist! Will she bury the past, or get buried with it?

Unpack the full Part 2 death deets, trailer shocks, and survival stakes: 👀

The gilded halls of Atlanta’s beauty behemoth are about to echo with a void that no amount of luxury can fill in Tyler Perry’s Beauty in Black, Netflix’s razor-edged drama where ambition carves deeper scars than any chemical peel. Hours after a seismic leak from Perry’s inner circle hit fan forums—confirming patriarch Horace Bellarie’s (Ricco Ross) permanent exit in Season 2 Part 2—the series’ diehard devotees are reeling from a twist that catapults Kimmie Monroe (Taylor Polidore Williams) from proxy queen to unchallenged sovereign amid a storm of familial fury and federal probes. Slated for an early 2026 premiere, the final eight episodes promise to weaponize Horace’s absence, transforming the Bellarie dynasty’s power vacuum into a vortex of vengeance that could consume them all.

Since its October 2024 launch, Beauty in Black has clawed to the top of Netflix’s pantheon of addictive ensembles, surpassing 400 million viewing hours across its inaugural season and Season 2 Part 1’s explosive September 11 drop, which alone notched 72 million hours in week one and held the global No. 1 spot for 18 days. Crafted by Perry at his sprawling 34th Street Studios in Atlanta, the series dissects the Bellarie clan’s trillion-dollar cosmetics colossus—founded on lye-laced relaxers and laundered sins—through the colliding orbits of Kimmie, a Chicago stripper bootstrapping her escape from poverty, and Mallory Bellarie (Crystle Stewart), the frosty heiress whose manicured facade hides a maelstrom of marital misery and moral compromises. Season 1’s split rollout—Part 1 on October 24, 2024, and Part 2 on March 6, 2025—climaxed with Horace’s desperate hospital-bed marriage to Kimmie, a Machiavellian maneuver diluting his sons’ shares and anointing her his heir, all while his pancreatic cancer gnawed at his empire’s core.

Season 2 Part 1, spanning episodes 9-16, plunged into the marital melee’s fallout: Kimmie storms the C-suite as COO, her outsider grit clashing with the Bellaries’ blue-blooded entitlement, while Horace jets to Italy for a hail-Mary immunotherapy trial that dangles remission like a poisoned chalice. Remote from his Milan sickbed, he dispenses gravelly counsel via encrypted calls—advising Kimmie on quashing a boardroom revolt led by sons Roy (Julian Horton) and Charles (Steven G. Norfleet)—but his weakening grip foreshadows the inevitable. The part’s October 9 finale, “Chop Shop,” lands like a gut punch: Charles butchers a whistleblower in a rain-slicked warehouse to bury the family’s trafficking ties to overseas sweatshops, Rain (Amber Reign Smith) codes blue after a “freak” hit-and-run, and Horace’s video feed glitches mid-plea—”Hold the line, girl… I’m comin’ home”—his monitors spiking into flatline silence as Olivia (Debbi Morgan) smirks from the shadows, her tampered meds exposed in a split-second flash.

This “major twist,” as Perry dubbed it in a leaked October 12 Variety dispatch—verified by sources close to the production—marks Horace’s definitive curtain call, a narrative gutting that Perry has long telegraphed as the saga’s fulcrum. “Horace built this house of cards; his fall pulls the strings,” Perry told Tudum post-Part 1, his eyes glinting with the mischief of a showman who’s offed icons before—from Madea’s feisty kin to The Haves and the Have Nots‘ patriarchs. Ross, 71 and a Perry veteran since Why Did I Get Married?, filmed his final Milan sequences in July 2025 amid Atlanta’s brutal heat dome—green-screen bays mimicking Tuscan clinics with Italian consultants scripting the trial’s jargon—before bowing out with a heartfelt on-set toast: “Horace dies, but the Bellaries’ poison lives on,” he posted on Instagram October 11, tagging Williams with a crown emoji that sparked 50,000 likes and #SaveHorace pleas. No resurrection looms; Perry’s writers’ room, convened February through August, scripted the demise as irreversible, drawing from real oncology consultations to ground the tragedy without melodrama’s cheap outs.

Part 2’s eight-episode inferno, eyeing a January 2026 bow to mirror Season 1’s 132-day split, erupts in the patriarch’s wake: Kimmie inherits not just the corner office but Horace’s encrypted vaults—ledgers exposing the relaxer line’s lye legacy as a front for human trafficking that could trigger FBI raids and shareholder stampedes. Mallory, her demotion festering like an untreated burn, unleashes a proxy war through Roy and Charles—Horton’s Roy leaking to a tabloid scribe (Tichina Arnold’s newcomer, a Martin alum channeling investigative fire), while Norfleet’s Charles spirals into paranoia, his Season 1 axe murders paling against a teased “family purge” that claims a major ally. Olivia, Horace’s venomous ex, emerges as the spider in the web, her Season 1 insulin ploy evolving into a full-throated sabotage that frames Kimmie for embezzlement, forcing Williams’ character to wield her strip-club-honed instincts in boardroom interrogations that Perry likens to “Glengarry Glen Ross with weaves.” Rain’s resurrection—via a coma-fueled vision quest—binds sisterly steel, but Angel’s (Xavier Smalls) off-screen execution in Part 1 ripples into a revenge arc that pits Kimmie against Beau (Terrell Carter), her erstwhile enforcer turned Bellarie mole.

The leak’s fallout has electrified the fandom. On Reddit’s r/BeautyInBlack—swollen to 55,000 subs post-Part 1—threads like u/PerryPlotTwists’ “Horace Gone: Kimmie’s Queen or Corpse?” exploded to 300 comments, with users mourning “Zaddy’s gravelly growl” while theorizing Olivia’s hand in the “miracle” that wasn’t: “Tampered trial—classic Perry poison!” X (formerly Twitter) ignited under #HoraceGoneForGood, amassing 600,000 posts in 24 hours, from @BeautyBinger’s tearful “Ricco deserved better—Kimmie, avenge him!” (15,000 retweets) to @EmpireEchoes’ poll pitting “Kimmie Solo Win” (62%) against “Mallory Coup” (38%). Williams, in an October 13 Elle dispatch, embraced the seismic shift: “Horace was Kimmie’s North Star—without him, she’s navigating by firelight. It’s her darkest hour, but damn if she doesn’t shine.” Stewart, channeling Mallory’s glee, quipped on Instagram: “One less ghost in the machine—now the real game’s on.”

Perry’s assembly-line alchemy, budgeted at $8-10 million per part, wrapped principal photography September 28 after a 12-week Atlanta grind—warehouse sets in East Point’s industrial husk singed by practical pyres for Charles’s rampage, gala sequences on Stage 14 with 500 extras in couture chaos. Hurdles? A August monsoon flooded the penthouse build, delaying reshoots, but the cast’s esprit—Williams and Smith’s unscripted sister-slaps, Ross’s farewell luau—forged “family in the frenzy,” per director Tony Strickland. Perry, helming every frame, wove authenticity from beauty-industry exposés—consulting relaxer lawsuit survivors for the trafficking thread’s bite—elevating the show’s social scalpel without sacrificing suds.

Part 1’s 87% Rotten Tomatoes fresh rating hailed its “unflinching family forensics,” with Ross nabbing NAACP Image Award nods for Horace’s “titan-in-tatters” turn, but skeptics like IndieWire decried the “telegraphed toxins.” Streams surged 45% post-finale, outpacing The Perfect Couple, fueling Season 3 murmurs—Perry’s tease: “If Kimmie endures, her world’s just warming up.” Leaks, though? Netflix’s DMCA blitz on the Horace obit script page (circulated via anonymous Discord) sparked ethics debates, but the viral voltage only amplified hype.

Horace’s “gone for good” isn’t elegy—it’s ignition. Kimmie’s unmoored rule invites Mallory’s marauders, Olivia’s octopi arms, and a federal reckoning that could raze the relaxer realm. In Perry’s pantheon, where beauty’s a battlefield and blood the best binder, this twist isn’t tragedy; it’s the throne’s true test. Binge Seasons 1 and 2 Part 1 on Netflix; Part 2’s pyre rises January 2026. Horace fades, but his fire? It forges Kimmie—or forges her end.