Most celebrity brand deals follow the same script: a company pays a famous person a flat fee to appear in ads, the campaign runs for a year or two, and the money stops the day the contract ends. Ryan Reynolds has spent the better part of a decade running a different playbook — and the receipts are two of the largest celebrity-linked business exits of the past five years.
The mechanism is simple to state and hard to execute: instead of licensing his face, Reynolds has repeatedly bought equity in small, underdog consumer brands, then used his own marketing company to grow them from the inside. When the brand sells, he isn’t collecting a fee. He’s collecting a return.
Aviation Gin: from investor to exit
Reynolds acquired a stake in Aviation American Gin in February 2018, well before the brand was a household name, and folded its marketing into Maximum Effort, the ad agency he co-founded. The gin’s ads — dry, self-aware, unmistakably Reynolds — became as much a part of the brand’s identity as the product itself.
In August 2020, spirits giant Diageo bought Aviation for a deal worth up to $610 million: $335 million paid at closing, with the remaining $275 million contingent on the brand hitting sales targets over the following ten years. Reynolds didn’t fully cash out either — he kept an ongoing ownership interest in the brand even after Diageo took control, meaning he continues to have skin in the outcome those future payments depend on.
Mint Mobile: the same playbook, a bigger number
Reynolds took an ownership position in budget wireless carrier Mint Mobile in 2019, again pairing his equity stake with hands-on marketing support from Maximum Effort. The strategy was near-identical to Aviation’s: use comedic, low-budget-feeling ads to make an unglamorous category — prepaid cell phone plans — feel like a brand worth talking about.
It worked well enough that T-Mobile came calling. In March 2023, T-Mobile announced it would acquire Ka’ena Corporation — the parent company of Mint Mobile, Ultra Mobile, and wholesale carrier Plum — in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion, split roughly 39% cash and 61% T-Mobile stock. Reynolds’ stake, reported at around 25% of the company, translated to an estimated $300 million personal payout.
Why the structure is the story
Neither deal is remarkable because a celebrity was involved in a successful ad campaign — that happens constantly. What makes Reynolds’ record notable is the consistency of the structure underneath it: identify a category where a low-budget, personality-driven marketing push can outperform bigger competitors’ spend, take equity instead of (or alongside) a fee, and let the brand’s growth curve become his own.
It’s a template that inverts the usual power dynamic between a celebrity and a brand. A spokesperson’s incentive is to look good in the ad and collect the check. An owner’s incentive is for the business itself to be worth more the day the ad campaign ends than the day it started — which is exactly what happened, twice, at a combined exit value north of $1.9 billion.
The lesson beyond Reynolds
The Aviation and Mint Mobile deals have become a reference case for a broader shift already visible across sports and entertainment: talent treating fame as an asset to be invested rather than rented out, the same creator-to-mogul logic now reshaping how influencers and musicians build businesses instead of just endorsing them. The distinction between “paid spokesperson” and “owner” sounds small in a press release. In Reynolds’ case, it was worth hundreds of millions of dollars in the difference.