Pitbull

Armando Christian Pérez understood before anyone else that Hollywood doesn't buy songs, it buys walking brands. Dressed in a tight white suit and dark sunglasses he never takes off indoors, the son of Cuban exiles born in Miami in 1981 built an empire without asking the film purists for permission.

Nobody expected the movie industry to surrender to his formula.

In 2009, he made his mark on big-budget blockbusters with the theme song for Fast & Furious. But the real shake-up came three years later, when Sony Pictures boldly chose to replace Will Smith for the main music of its intergalactic spy franchise. The song "Back in Time," recorded for Men in Black 3 in 2012, racked up more than two million digital downloads and confirmed that his sound fit perfectly with summer box office hits.

Voice acting and animated cartoons

Stepping into the voice booth was an inevitable move. In 2013, Chris Wedge cast him in Epic, an animated film in which he brought to life Bufo, a mobster toad who ran the forest's illegal betting with the same street-smart swagger as his music videos.

The role was brief and didn't call for a major dramatic performance, but it served to test the waters in a field where children's studios move stratospheric budgets.

He repeated the move six years later.

In 2019, he took on the role of Ugly Dog in UglyDolls and also served as executive producer of the soundtrack. The project flopped at the box office, with just 31 million dollars in worldwide gross, against a production cost that far exceeded 45 million. The financial setback did not slow his ambitions at the box office. After all, in his mind, the business never depended solely on a weekend opening.

The Stumble with the New York Mafia

The most bewildering adventure in his screen career came linked to John Travolta. In 2018, director Kevin Connolly hired him to compose the original score for Gotti, the biographical drama about the boss of the Gambino family.

Taking on the incidental score for a classic crime drama required orchestral codes far removed from the nightclub. So he recruited producer Jorge Gómez to arrange the acoustic instrumentation while he produced the urban beats and the promotional track "Amore."

Critics tore the film apart from its first screening. The movie earned a 0% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes after piling up dozens of scathing reviews that questioned every last editing decision.

That debacle didn't keep him up at night.

Shortly after, he sold a dance version of the classic "Africa" by Toto for the soundtrack of Aquaman in 2018. In 2021, he diversified his investments by becoming a co-owner of the NASCAR team Trackhouse Racing. His production company's copyright catalog holds contracts closed under direct distribution agreements in home formats, with fixed budgets below one million dollars.