Seinfeld made Rob Reiner’s manufacturing firm a staggering sum of money

For Christmas one 12 months, I gave my grandfather a DVD field set of the primary seasons of “Seinfeld.” My dad thought it was a foolish reward, since a now-classic present like “Seinfeld” would most likely be rerun till the top of time. Up to now, my father was proper. Whilst streaming has remodeled the tv panorama, the supply and attraction of “Seinfeld” exhibits no indicators of waning. In reality, it’s this continued reputation that has helped rework by director Rob Reiner manufacturing firm, Fortress Rock Leisure, right into a money cow.

Named after Stephen King’s well-known coastal Maine setting, Fortress Rock Leisure is an American unbiased movie and tv manufacturing firm based in 1987 by Rob Reiner, Martin Shafer, Andrew Scheinman, Glenn Padnick and Alan Horn. The corporate has produced many acclaimed unbiased movies, together with The “Before” trilogy by Richard Linklatera number of Stephen King adaptations resembling “The Inexperienced Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption,” in addition to the crime thrillers “Homicide by Numbers” and “Michael Clayton.” The corporate didn’t discover the identical stage of success with tv exhibits, with only some of them, apart from the short-lived “The Single Man” and “Boston Widespread,” airing.

However no undertaking has achieved the identical stage of success as Jerry Seinfeld’s eponymous sitcom, “Seinfeld.” The quirky characters and observational humor have left such an imprint on in style tradition that phrases like “shrink,” “Festivus,” “chatty” and “double-dipping” have develop into a part of our shared vernacular. To what extent “maybe essentially the most worthwhile present in tv historical past”, as put by The New York Times put it on, preserve doing it?

According to the New York Post in 2017“Seinfeld” reportedly earned almost $4.06 billion in syndication. Men’s Journal Reports that co-creator and star Jerry Seinfeld (who created the sequence alongside comic Larry David) earned $1 million per episode in latest seasons, and with different syndication income and licensing offers, totaling roughly $465 million, mixed with different belongings, its web earnings worth finally snowballed to $1 billion. Not unhealthy for a comic who makes jokes about airplane meals.

The New York Occasions estimates that “Seinfeld” might have generated “maybe $1.5 billion in income” for Fortress Rock. That is an enormous sum for a sequence, however the lack of ability to launch different TV sequence and a string of field workplace failures like Eddie Murphy’s juvenile sci-fi comedy “The Adventures of Pluto Nash” (which screenwriter Ryan Scott questions is the biggest bomb of all time) or the too enigmatic “The Salton Sea”, led the corporate to be absolutely built-in into Warner Bros. in 2002. Rob Reiner nonetheless makes use of the Fortress Rock brand for a few of his unbiased movie productions, however finally the corporate is absolutely owned by Warner Bros. However the tide turned for the corporate on October 19, 2021, when it was revived with a $170 million funding from entrepreneur Derrick Rossi.

Fortress Rock Leisure lately produced an HBO documentary about revolutionary comic Albert Brooks titled “Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” and is getting ready a sequel to Rob Reiner’s rock and roll mockumentary “This Is Spinal Faucet.” As excited as we’re concerning the revival of Fortress Rock, it is ironic that regardless of all of the artistic tasks they’ve but to supply, it was finally a “present about nothing” that made them every little thing.