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Film director Shawn Levy was hard at work in London on Deadpool 3 with his close friend Ryan Reynolds when news broke this week that the Hollywood actor and entrepreneur had made yet another splashy investment.
Reynolds and other investors, including AC Milan owners RedBird Capital Partners, had taken a 24 per cent stake in the Alpine Formula One racing team, giving the Renault-backed group a valuation of $900mn.
But Reynolds, who is reprising his title role in the blockbuster Deadpool franchise, gave no indication to his colleagues on the film set that he was on the verge of another multimillion-dollar transaction — a testament to his uncanny ability to juggle his twin roles as a serial dealmaker and Hollywood superstar, Levy said.
“I always assume that Ryan is working on something huge in the shadows and on the sidelines, but I never feel the distraction or burden of everything else he’s got going on,” said Levy, who often works with Reynolds. “It’s one of his superpowers — he has this entrepreneurial vision, but [also] an ability to focus entirely on things he’s doing in a given moment.”
There are certainly plenty of demands on Reynolds’ attention. He starred in three films in 2021 — Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, Red Notice and Free Guy — followed by The Adam Project last year. Like the Deadpool movies, the latter two were made with Levy.
His life as a businessman has been just as hectic as his acting career. Through his company, Maximum Effort, Reynolds launched Aviation Gin, which he sold to Diageo for $610mn in 2020. And this year came the sale of Mint Mobile, the budget wireless group he part-owned, to T-Mobile for $1.35bn — a deal that could earn him $300mn if it is approved.
Even in such high-stakes matters, Reynolds displayed the wisecracking humour that has made him one of the most bankable actors in Hollywood. “We are so happy T-Mobile beat out an aggressive last-minute bid from my mom, Tammy Reynolds,” he said in a statement when the deal was announced.
With the Alpine F1 investment, Reynolds has expanded his budding — and unorthodox — sports portfolio. In 2021, he and fellow actor Rob McElhenney spent £2mn to buy Wrexham football club and made a reality show, Welcome to Wrexham. The show became a worldwide hit and helped spur the revival of the downtrodden Welsh team.
Through a mixture of investment, clever marketing — often built around Reynolds’ persona — and Hollywood stardust, Wrexham have won an international following and been promoted back into the English football league after a 15-year stint in the wilderness.
Levy said Wrexham’s success was a product of Reynolds’ eye for a good yarn, which he could then grow into a larger enterprise. The actor also left his mark on the lower reaches of English football after successfully lobbying for a new global streaming service to be set up so that Wrexham’s international fan base could tune in live.
“He likes building stories. He likes building brands. He likes building companies,” Levy said. “And his favourite endeavour is when those things come together, as they have with Wrexham, where a story is told, and as a result a brand and a business is built.”
Reynolds, 46, has taken the longer way round to success. He grew up as the youngest of four in Vancouver and began acting in television as a teenager, then moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s where he had a so-so career on the small screen.
Reynolds’ movie career began in the early 2000s, but he often garnered more attention for his love life (he was married to Scarlett Johannson from 2008 to 2011 and is now married to Blake Lively) than his film work. It was not until the 2016 release of Deadpool, which made more than $780mn at the box office, that he became a big film star.
Now, with the Alpine deal, Reynolds and his partners are investing in another sport that is finally growing in the US, much like football.
Formula One had long struggled to break into the US market, but has slowly gained popularity since US telecoms billionaire John Malone acquired F1 in an $8bn deal in 2017 through his Liberty Media group.
The sport has built a bigger audience through video gaming streams and the success of behind-the-scenes Netflix series Drive to Survive. F1 signed a 10-year deal to host a Grand Prix in Miami, Florida, from 2022, and this year F1 will make its debut in Las Vegas with a night-time race on the strip in November.
Alpine’s new investors are buying into a franchise that has failed to win the F1 world championships since 2006. But the sport’s closed system — there are only 10 teams — means that even underperforming franchises are seen as valuable assets, especially since rule changes were brought in that limit how much teams can spend on developing cars.
For Reynolds and Levy, there is also a lot riding on the next instalment of Deadpool, due out next year. It will mark the franchise’s introduction into the Marvel Cinematic Universe — a group of more than 30 films that includes some of the highest-grossing movies of all time. And it comes at a moment when some analysts fret the Marvel engine has lost some of its spark.
With so much riding on the film, Levy admitted he had worried that Reynolds’ entrepreneurial work might sap some of his attention. But the actor has reassured him that his mind is fully on the film.
“Ryan looked me in the eye and said, [Deadpool] is what launched this new stage of my career,” Levy recalled. “It’s more important than any other endeavour I have going on.”
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