Reese Witherspoon’s Production Company Hello Sunshine Exploring A Sale – Deadline
Hello Sunshine, Reese Witherspoon’s media company, is exploring a sale, Deadline has confirmed.
The company behind the HBO hit Big Little Lies is said to have been approached by suitors and is evaluating its options.
Hello Sunshine is owned by Witherspoon with partners Seth Rodsky and former CAA agent Jim Toth, who is Witherspoon’s husband. Other investors include AT&T through Otter Media and Lauren Powell Jobs’ Emersen Collective.
Productions also include Little Fires Everywhere on Hulu and Apple’s The Morning Show.
The Wall Street Journal cited people close to the situation saying the company could be valued at as much as $1 billion in a deal.
It’s a period of rapid consolidation in media marked by a quest for content to feed an army of streaming services. Amazon recently agreed to buy MGM for $8.45 billion. Apple is said to be one of the parties interested in Hello Sunshine. It’s not clear that any deal will go down but the outreach shows that big media and tech companies are casting a wider and wider net.
In May, AT&T and Discovery reached a definitive agreement to combine WarnerMedia’s premium entertainment, sports and news assets with Discovery’s leading nonfiction and international entertainment and sports businesses to create a single company. The deal in that case was AT&T cutting the cord on WarnerMedia only three years after buying Time Warner and launching HBO Max but finding it tough to compete in a crowded market given its other financial obligations like spectrum, fiver and 5G.
Discovery, which rules in unscripted fare, adds scripted content to its portfolio and streaming assets.
