A red-hot focus on streaming is driving valuations sky high for content providers who can play in the space, as evidenced by the lofty $8.45B that Amazon announced in May it would pay to acquire MGM Studios and the $3B valuation that indie studio A24 is said to be seeking in a prospective sale to Apple. This week, Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine became the latest production studio to be acquired, gobbled up by private equity heavyweight the Blackstone Group for $900M. Witherspoon co-founded Hello Sunshine in 2016 with a focus on producing content centered on women. The studio has gone on to deliver on this promise with popular streaming series such as Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere and The Morning Show.
Blackstone will maintain Hello Sunshine’s strategy to sell its creations to a variety of streaming services, unlike MGM and A24 which would be folded in as exclusive suppliers for the in-house streaming services of their much larger parent companies, Amazon and Apple.