While it\u2019s an iconic line from her career-making film Legally Blonde, it\u2019s also a mantra that Reese Witherspoon lives by. The actress-turned-media-company owner has long had the grit required to ideate, found, and ultimately sell a near-billion-dollar company that flipped Hollywood\u2019s script on its head.<\/p>\n
By the time Witherspoon was 34, she had spent two decades inside the movie business, she had seen enough. The scripts landing on her desk in 2011 were, in her words, \u201cabysmal [and] really demeaning. One project built around a man with two women \u201cjust vying for his affection\u201d really pushed her over the edge because of its \u201cgross jokes and scatological humor,\u201d Witherspoon said on a recently published episode of Founder Mindset by Harvard Business School\u2019s Reza Satchu.<\/p>\n
\u201cI called my agent, and I said, I\u2019m not auditioning for this, and I\u2019m not interested,\u201d she said. In response, her agent told her every actress in Hollywood was fighting for those two parts because there was nothing else.\u00a0<\/p>\n
So Witherspoon set out on what she called a \u201clistening tour,\u201d visiting the heads of all seven major studios with a single question: How many movies are you developing right now with a female lead? The answer, for the most part, was none. One executive even told her the studio had already made one movie \u201cwith the woman at the center of it\u201d that year, and couldn\u2019t make a second.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst I got mad, and then I was like, Wait\u2014this is a huge white space,\u201d she told Satchu.<\/p>\n
With that, Witherspoon set out on her journey to develop Hello Sunshine, a movie company \u201cmade by and for the next generation of women\u201d with the mission of putting female stories at the center of film, television, podcasts, books, and other media.<\/p>\n
The financial scare that shaped a founder\u2019s mindset<\/p>\n
Witherspoon grew up in a household that hit \u201csome pretty bad places\u201d with money in her teenage years, thanks to her father\u2019s \u201cspending issues,\u201d she said. At 16 or 17, she was pulled in to help. The experience shaped her worldview, which has driven every professional decision since.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was always had this idea that no one\u2019s coming to save me,\u201d she said. \u201cI didn\u2019t have a financial safety net\u2026 my parents were loving and kind, but they didn\u2019t have the means to send me to college. I knew I was going to have to do it on my own, and if I didn\u2019t succeed, there wasn\u2019t anybody coming to save me.\u201d<\/p>\n
That same mindset forced her out of Stanford after roughly a year.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think people try to paint my dropout story like, I\u2019m some sort of wunderkind that had some great business,\u201d she said. \u201cBut it was literally just I couldn\u2019t pay for\u2014I couldn\u2019t afford tuition.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Tuition, she remembered, was about $33,000 a year. But acting jobs paid. Years later, when she realized the reality of the studio system, she used the same mindset: If she didn\u2019t build the company, no one was going to build it for her.<\/p>\n
From Pacific Standard to a $900 million exit<\/p>\n
Witherspoon\u2019s first formal attempt at fixing Hollywood\u2019s woman problem came through Pacific Standard, the production company she ran with Australian film producer Bruna Papandrea.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Their first two book options\u2014Cheryl Strayed\u2019s Wild and Gillian Flynn\u2019s Gone Girl\u2014both hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller lists. The film adaptations, plus the HBO<\/a> co-production Big Little Lies, racked up \u201cthree Oscar nominations and over $600 million in the box office,\u201d she said. (Witherspoon retained control<\/a> of Pacific Standard after parting ways with Papandrea in 2016.)<\/p>\n But the economics didn\u2019t work.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was only working for producer fees. I had four employees, and I was only breaking even,\u201d she said during the podcast interview. \u201cThe overhead was eating me alive. That\u2019s not a real business.\u201d<\/p>\n The fix was Hello Sunshine, the mission-driven media company Witherspoon cofounded in 2016 with Strand Equity\u2019s Seth Rodsky, initially as a partnership with AT&T\u2019s Otter Media<\/a>. It\u2019s main mission was to put women at the center of every story.\u00a0<\/p>\n Hits from Hello Sunshine followed quickly, including Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu<\/a>, and The Morning Show on Apple<\/a> TV+, and the influential Reese\u2019s Book Club.<\/p>\n In August 2021, Witherspoon sold a majority stake<\/a> in Hello Sunshine to a Blackstone-backed venture led by former Disney<\/a> executives Kevin Mayer and Tom Staggs in a deal that valued the company at roughly $900 million. Witherspoon and CEO Sarah Harden retained significant equity and board seats, Blackstone announced<\/a> at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n But for Witherspoon, that sale number is less the point than the proof of concept it offers.<\/p>\n \u201cI hope that people out here\u2026will think \u2018I\u2019m going to have the next Hello Sunshine,\u2019\u201d she said. \u201cBecause it is possible.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"While it\u2019s an iconic line from her career-making film Legally Blonde, it\u2019s also a mantra that Reese Witherspoon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":453608,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[321,93,3211,61,60,32064,13984,962],"class_list":["post-453607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-hollywood","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-most-powerful-women","tag-reese-witherspoon","tag-success"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453607","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=453607"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/453607\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/453608"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=453607"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=453607"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=453607"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}