Ryan Reynolds

The Stigma of the Green Tights

Ryan Reynolds was born in Vancouver in 1976 and spent his early years on Canadian teen series sets without much fame. In 1991, he starred in Hillside for Nickelodeon. It was a dry learning phase where the pay barely covered the rent on a shared apartment in a city that didn't know him yet.

In the late nineties, he moved to Los Angeles with a beat-up car and a clenched jaw. He landed the lead role in the comedy Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place in 1998. The show ran for four seasons, but to the industry Reynolds was still a supporting player with good looks who never quite broke through at the major studios.

Nobody gave him a chance.

In 2011, he starred in Green Lantern, and the result was a financial disaster that cost 200 million dollars. Critics tore it apart without mercy. That failure could have buried his career for good, because in Hollywood, mistakes of that size are usually punished with oblivion or straight-to-video roles.

The Journey of the Mouthy Mercenary

Reynolds spent eleven years trying to get anyone to finance a movie about a disfigured, foul-mouthed antihero. In 2014, a test footage he had shot himself on a computer mysteriously leaked online. The public reaction on the internet pushed 20th Century Fox to greenlight the project with a tight budget by the standards of the genre.

In 2016, Deadpool hit theaters and broke box office records for an R-rated movie. The film grossed more than $780 million worldwide. Reynolds not only starred in it but also controlled every line of the script (alongside Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) and every piece of the marketing campaign.

And the gamble paid off.

After the success of the sequel in 2018, the actor decided his public image should be his most profitable asset. In 2021, he starred in Free Guy, and in 2024 he closed the circle with Deadpool & Wolverine. That film surpassed the 1,000 million dollar mark in its global box office run.

The Actor Who Bought His Own Industry

His business career began to outweigh acting starting in the 2020s. That same year, he and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC, a Welsh soccer club struggling in England's fifth tier. The move seemed like a joke for a documentary but ended up as a marketing operation that revitalized an entire town.

But his biggest financial win didn't happen on a movie set.

In March 2023, T-Mobile acquired Mint Mobile, a phone carrier in which Reynolds was the majority shareholder. The deal closed for a total value of 1,350 million dollars. The actor received a substantial part of that sum in cash and shares of the carrier.

His production company, Maximum Effort, signed an exclusive deal with Paramount in 2022 to develop original content. Reynolds now controls the production schedules and budgets of his stories with a level of autonomy few names in the industry can match. The shoot for Animal Friends in 2025 combines live action with digital animation under very high post-production costs.

His sponsorship deal with Aviation Gin brought him another 610 million dollars in 2020.