Reese Witherspoon’s $900 million empire explained

With Daisy Jones and The Six on Amazon Prime Video, Protect them on Apple TV+ and Tiny Beautiful Things on Disney+, three series will start within a few weeks in spring 2023 that have one thing in common: They were all produced by Reese Witherspoon.

Many know Reese Witherspoon as an actress with countless iconic roles as well as Oscar, Golden Globe and Emmy awards. In recent years, however, she has had her greatest successes as a puller behind the scenes. So she has created a huge film and series empire that many are not even aware of. We explain what is behind it – and how it came to this.

From Legally Blonde! on Gone Girl: Reese Witherspoon saw a problem in Hollywood and solved it

Reese Witherspoon landed her first film role at the age of 14 in the drama The Man on the Moon. In the 1990s, further engagements followed in films such as Fear, Pleasantville, Eiskalte Engel and Election. The big career breakthrough came after the turn of the millennium. As Elle Woods in Legally Blonde! she achieved cult status and won her first Oscar in 2006 for Walk the Line.

But in the years that followed, she became increasingly dissatisfied with the roles that were offered to her. “Actually, at a certain point, Hollywood stopped developing films with women at the center.”, she said in an interview with Time Magazine . Instead she got”misogynistScripts on the table. So she decided to just create those roles herself. That was the Birth of one of the most influential companies in Hollywood.

The driving force behind Reese Witherspoon’s production work is her passion for books. Her first self-produced successes were the novel adaptations of The Great Trip – Wild and Gone Girl – The Perfect Victim. These were still created in the production forge Pacific Standard, which was founded with Bruna Papandrea.

Finally, in 2016, Reese co-founded Witherspoon with Seth Rodsky and Otter Media the media company Hello Sunshine – your previous film production company was included as a subsidiary. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Witherspoon describes her company’s mission as follows:

[Es geht darum] to create a space for women to tell their story in their own words. Whether it’s in a book, a podcast, or a social media post, it’s about self-expression and showing the full spectrum of the female experience.

And she succeeded. It followed an unprecedented success story by and featuring the biggest female names in Hollywood.

From Amazon to Netflix: Reese Witherspoon’s recipe for success for popular series

Hello Sunshine has produced hit series like The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere and Big Little Lies and has brought stars like Nicole Kidman, Kerry Washington and Jennifer Aniston on board. At the heart of the projects are sophisticated stories about complex female figures, which repeatedly inspire enthusiasm among critics and the public. The HBO production Big Little Lies, for example, was nominated for 16 Emmy Awards with season 1 alone and won eight. This was followed by four Golden Globes.

For the past seven years, Reese Witherspoon has produced films and series for the big names in TV: HBO, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+. The cooperation with Apple’s streaming service has even produced five series.

Reese Witherspoon’s series productions not only create interesting roles for women, but also promote the visibility of female artists in front of and behind the camera in male-dominated Hollywood. However, the celebration of female voices and stories is not limited to films and series: from 2017 it became established Reese’s Book Club .

Monthly, Witherspoon recommends books of various genres that focus on women via a newsletter and social media (the Book Club’s Instagram page now has 2.5 million followers). The self-proclaimed bookworm Reese shares in the form of video posts why the books she has chosen are particularly worth reading and inspire her personally.

Almost every book presented becomes a bestseller and ends up on a wide variety of top lists, such as the New York Times bestseller list. As a result, the Book Club developed into an institution and one of the most important cogs in Reese Witherspoon’s success machine.

Because the books presented are often titles for which Witherspoon secured the adaptation rights before publication. In other words: it helps a substance to be successful with its own popularity or at least boosts sales. And then benefits from it in their adaptationsthat the material already has an integrated fan base.

15 projects in 7 years: Reese Witherspoon developed a license to print money

The best-known example of the exploitation chain from a specially created bestseller to a hit film is The Song of the Crayfish. The novel by Delia Owens ended up on Reese’s recommendation list shortly after publication and became a mega success, which was also reflected at the box office. The drama, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones, grossed over $140 million worldwide. And that with a budget of 24 million.

Haven’t seen the crayfish singing yet? Here’s the trailer:

As of now, 55 books have been featured in Reese’s Book Club. Witherspoon has it already had seven books filmeddeveloped for different platforms. Apart from bestselling film adaptations, Hello Sunshine also produces successful titles by and for women. Since its founding in 2016, the company has co-developed 15 films and series, including:

It remains to be seen whether the three most recent series productions on Amazon, Apple TV+ and Disney+ will be as successful as the previous titles. The projects at least meet two important criteria: They are book adaptations and, with actresses such as Jennifer Garner and Kathryn Hahn, have big Hollywood stars in the lead roles.

Anyway, Hello Sunshine remains a unique success story. When Reese Witherspoon sold shares in the company in 2021, the company’s value increased above 900 million dollars fixed. Forbes magazine then declared her a richest actress in the world.

And that’s exactly what Reese Witherspoon remains, despite all the smart business moves: an actress. She will be back in front of the camera for Season 3 of The Morning Show. The new episodes were filmed in February 2023 and are scheduled to come to Apple TV+ later that year. Produced by Reese Witherspoon, of course.

News for further reading:

Podcast for series fans: The 20 best series starts in March on Netflix & Co

Need more fresh streaming tips? You can find the most exciting series that you can stream on Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and more in March here in the monthly preview:

We have checked the long starting lists of the streaming services and present you the 20 big highlights of the month in the Moviepilot podcast stream trawl. Also included are new seasons of The Mandalorian and Netflix’s fantasy hit Shadow & Bone, as well as the sci-fi series Extrapolations.

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