Reese Witherspoon Got Hello Sunshine Back Cheap. Half the Staff Didn't Make the Trip
Candle Media bought her company at a $900 million valuation in 2021. It came home this month for a sliver of that, and Friday came the cuts.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
In 2021 a company called Candle Media, with Blackstone's money behind it, looked at Reese Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine, a producer of good television and a book club, and put a $900 million valuation on it. You could buy a fair-sized town for that, with a working water system. Blackstone is a firm of very smart people, and I want to say that, because they'd want it said, and because nothing else in this story will suggest it.
Five years on, Witherspoon and the French producer Mediawan bought the company back on Oct. 13. TheWrap reports the price at "low to mid eight figures," which at the high end is about $50 million, and that's a decline of roughly 94%. A person close to Candle explained the whole thing to TheWrap in four words: "We were just wrong." I've been reading business journalism for a long time and it's the most honest sentence I've ever seen in it. They should carve it over the door at Harvard.
So consider the deal from the star's side. She sold the place when the price was silly, watched someone else lose their shirt for five years, then bought it back for about what a superhero movie spends on the cape. This is how the wealthy go to the store. The rest of us buy a thing and it breaks. They sell it to a fool, wait, and buy it back from the wreckage, with the fool's new carpet still in it.
On Friday came the other half of the arithmetic. Hello Sunshine let go about half its staff, roughly 30 people, according to TheWrap, Deadline and Variety, and TheWrap says the direct-to-consumer team was eliminated outright. This follows at least four earlier rounds under Candle in the past two years. The company declined to comment. What's left will concentrate on film, television and Reese's Book Club, which is a nice way of saying it's going to do the things it was doing before someone showed up with $900 million and a theory.
Those 30 people didn't lose $850 million or make it. They just had the ill fortune to work in the building while that much money caught fire overhead. I'd like to tell you someone at Blackstone is sleeping badly tonight, but there's a whole floor of people there whose job is to see that nobody does.
A fool and his money are soon parted, the old line goes. It leaves out that the fool never has to clean out his desk.