How Reese Witherspoon built and sold a $900 million media empire

Reese Witherspoon – Oscar-winning actor and fiction mega-influencer, decision to bet on herself and create women-led stories is paying off richly; She sold her production company Hello Sunshine to Blackstone-backed media company Candle Media for $900 million in 2021. Forbes estimates her net worth is now $400m after the deal. Witherspoon retains an ownership stake of at least 18% and collected an estimated $120 million after taxes, from the sale of about half of her 40% stake in the company. The rest of her fortune is tied to her earnings from her 30-year-long career as a successful actress and producer.

Laura Jeanne Reese Witherspoon was born on March 22, 1976, in New Orleans. Her father served as a lieutenant in the United States Army Reserve and her mother, Mary Elizabeth, was a professor of nursing at Vanderbilt University and had a Ph.D. in pediatric nursing. Witherspoon was raised an Episcopalian, and has said she is proud of the "definitive Southern upbringing" she received. At age seven, she was selected as a model for a florist's television advertisement, which motivated her to take acting lessons. At age 11, she took first place in the Ten-State Talent Fair. She received high grades in school, loved reading, and considered herself ‘a big dork who read loads of books’. Reese later attended Stanford University as an English literature major but left prior to completing her studies to pursue an acting career.

Witherspoon began her career as a teenager, making her screen debut in The Man in the Moon. Her breakthrough came in 1999 with a supporting role in Cruel Intentions, and for her portrayal of Tracy Flick in the black comedy Election, she gained wider recognition for playing Elle Woods in the comedy Legally Blonde. In 2005, she gained critical acclaim and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for portraying June Carter Cash in the musical biopic Walk the Line.

In 2000, she set up her own production company, Type A Films. But it wasn’t until 2014, two years after she merged her company with Australian producer Bruna Papandrea’s, to form Pacific Films, that she became the primary backer of a major project. 

Her vision was to create a slate that championed and focused on projects created by and focusing on women. The first to come out was Wild, based on Cheryl Strayed’s bestselling memoir, and starring Witherspoon, is the story of a young woman dealing with grief, divorce, and heroin addiction, who sets out alone to hike 1,100 miles of North America’s Pacific Crest Trail. She was nominated for her second Academy Award for this performance. The same year, Pacific Films brought out the David Fincher-directed thriller Gone Girl, for which Rosamund Pike was nominated for Best Actress. 

This meant that at the 2014 Oscars, Witherspoon was up against the star of one of her own films. It was the moment that she established herself not just as a serious actor again, but a producer with the uncanny knack of choosing books with the potential to become both critical and commercial on-screen hits. Gone Girl is Fincher’s most profitable film, it made $369 million on a budget of $61 million.

Her approach tapped into and perhaps helped direct the zeitgeist as she continued to throw her support behind projects that put strong female characters in front of the camera, and allegations began to draw a spotlight to the abuse of actresses by male filmmakers going on behind it. Over the next few years, Witherspoon’s work both behind and in front of the camera became only more focussed on feminist issues – and more lucrative. In 2017, she brought out the HBO miniseries based on the bestselling thriller Big Little Lies, about a rarefied enclave of uber-wealthy Californian mothers plunged into a murder investigation. The show was an immediate phenomenon, the first season was a rating smash, and was nominated for 16 Emmys, of which it won eight.

Reese has been making millions from her acting roles. According to Parade, Reese made $250k for her role in Cruel Intentions in 1999. But a few years later, she was making about 60x as much, $15 million for Legally Blonde 2. There doesn’t appear to be any public info about exactly how much she was paid for the first Legally Blonde movie in 2001, but it’s a safe bet that she negotiated a much higher payday for the sequel considering the first movie was such a success.

In her role in Sweet Home Alabama, she earned $12.5 million, and it was reported that her standard salary request was $15 million as she booked roles in movies like Four Christmases and Walk the Line. CBS News reported in 2007 that the actor was typically getting paid between $15 and $20 million per movie role at the time.

Reese reportedly made $1 million per episode for the second season of Big Little Lies, according to Forbes, Apple paid her $12 million for her to be on The Morning Show with fellow producer/actor Jennifer Aniston and she made a cool $9 million for Little Fires Everywhere, which Reese starred in and produced, with Kerry Washington.

Witherspoon has been a force of nature in the film/tv world and she has created a company that has produced a string of hits critically and financially on and off-screen, and she seems she will be a really valuable asset to Candle Media and Blackstone for what she might produce in the future. She’s only just getting started.