Reese Witherspoon’s media business, Hello Sunshine, is selling itself to a firm backed by private-equity giant Blackstone Group. The companies didn’t disclose the terms of the deal.
Benjamin Mullin and Miriam Gottfried for The Wall Street Journal:
People familiar with the matter said it values Ms. Witherspoon’s company, whose production slate has included programming such as the HBO drama “Big Little Lies,” at about $900 million.
The as-yet-unnamed media venture Blackstone is backing will be run by former Walt Disney Co. executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs. Hello Sunshine will be its first acquisition. Ms. Witherspoon and Hello Sunshine Chief Executive Sarah Harden will join the board of the new company and will continue to operate Hello Sunshine.
Blackstone is spending more than $500 million in cash to purchase shares from existing Hello Sunshine investors, including AT&T Inc. T +1.03% and Emerson Collective, some of the people familiar with the matter said. Ms. Witherspoon and some Hello Sunshine executives and investors will roll over the remaining equity into ownership stakes in the new company Blackstone is forming.
MacDailyNews Not: For Apple TV+, Hello Sunshine produces The Morning Show and Truth Be Told with an upcoming Untitled Colleen McGuinness comedy series in the works.
If Apple had made this deal I might have sold all of my stock! This company is not worth 100m let alone 900m. IF MGM, a hundred year old company with a library of 5,000 movies and thousands of hours of TV series is worth $8.5b that means Hello Sunshine, a three year old company with only partial ownership of one mediocre mini series can’t be worth more than 10 percent of MGM. Unless Hello Sunshine wants to get into the risky and expensive network television business (they don’t) there is no way this deal can possibly pencil out. Silly money chasing silly business model. Good for Reese and her partners, but everything else makes NO sense.