Ryan Reynolds used his celebrity and wit to build Mint Mobile into a low-cost competitor in the crowded wireless business.
Now, the Hollywood star and his backers are cashing in: selling the upstart brand to T-Mobile US Inc. in a cash and stock deal valued at up to $1.35 billion.
Mr. Reynolds, a part owner of Mint Mobile, was the personality in the company's ads, both on television and social media. The ads, such as a recent one where he read ad copy written for him by Chat GPT, also showcased his own advertising agency.
Following the planned takeover, T-Mobile said the "Deadpool" star would stay on in a creative capacity and the company would keep the Mint Mobile brand. Mr. Reynolds will continue to appear in Mint Mobile's ads.
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He posted a video on Twitter on Wednesday joking along with T-Mobile's chief executive. "T-Mobile has assured me that our incredibly improvised and borderline reckless messaging strategy will also remain untouched," Mr. Reynolds said in the video, which ends with the two men hugging.
Mr. Reynolds is heavily involved in the advertising business, helping his own and other brands create attention-getting campaigns. He is chief creative officer at advertising technology company MNTN and co-founder of production and marketing firm Maximum Effort, which MNTN bought in 2021.
Maximum Effort expanded into marketing after Mr. Reynolds became an investor in Aviation American Gin and Mint Mobile. Mr. Reynolds purchased an undisclosed stake in Aviation American Gin in 2018 and a stake in Mint Mobile in 2019. Diageo PLC bought Aviation American Gin as part of a deal worth up to $610 million in 2020. Mr. Reynolds kept an ownership interest.
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He has appeared and created ads for both brands. Maximum Effort also has created ads for a wide range of companies including Autodesk Inc., Peloton Interactive Inc. and Match Group Inc. Mr. Reynolds described its approach as "fastvertising" -- seeking to create viral ads at the speed of what people are talking about.
"Everything we do is scrappy. It's fast, it's inexpensive, character over spectacle," he said in a WSJ. Magazine interview.
T-Mobile, which used to market itself as the upstart to AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., is now the second-biggest U.S. operator by subscribers and battling for growth in a mature wireless industry. T-Mobile took over Sprint Corp. in 2020 in a deal valued at more than $30 billion.
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Mint Mobile resells service using T-Mobile's network, so the deal will save costs but doesn't bring new customers to T-Mobile. The companies didn't disclose how many customers Mint Mobile has.
"Over the long term, we'll also benefit from applying the marketing formula Mint has become famous for across more parts of T-Mobile," T-Mobile Chief Executive Mike Sievert said.
It gives T-Mobile another prepaid brand, along with Metro by T-Mobile and Connect by T-Mobile, that caters to lower-income users. Mint charges as little as $15 a month. T-Mobile ended 2022 with about 21.4 million prepaid subscribers.
T-Mobile said Wednesday that it would pay 39% in cash and 61% in stock for Mint Mobile's parent company, Ka'ena Corp.
The deal, expected to close later this year, also includes Ka'ena's other brands, including Ultra Mobile and wholesaler Plum.
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T-Mobile has in recent quarters outpaced rivals AT&T and Verizon when it came to postpaid phone subscribers, a metric investors use to gauge the strength of a cellphone carrier's profit center. Growth of those subscribers has largely slowed across the industry after a pandemic-fueled spurt.
--Suzanne Vranica contributed to this article.
