Background and career
Rhett Reese is an American screenwriter. His early credits included Clifford's Really Big Movie and Cruel Intentions 3. He has collaborated with Paul Wernick, writing the films Zombieland, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, and Life, as well as Deadpool, Deadpool 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. Together they also created the reality series The Joe Schmo Show.
Rhett Reese grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he met Paul Wernick when the two attended Phoenix Country Day School. Rheese attended Stanford University.
As a budding screenwriter, Reese met Wernick again as he worked as a television producer, and one of Wernick's jobs, Big Brother 2, inspired both to do their own take on reality shows, The Joe Schmo Show. Broadcast on Spike TV, the series drew the highest ratings for the channel. The Joe Schmo Show was also named on numerous Best Of lists, including Time magazine's "Top 10 TV Shows of 2003" and Entertainment Weekly's "50 Best TV Shows Ever on DVD." In 2004, Reese and Wernick created and executive-produced Stuck on ODB, a comedy reality show starring Ol' Dirty Bastard (ODB) of the Wu Tang Clan for Spike TV. However, ODB died before the show ever aired. A year later, Wernick and Reese followed up with Invasion Iowa, a high-concept, high-stakes comedy hybrid starring William Shatner. The show premiered on Spike on March 29, 2005. Reese and Wernick's first feature collaboration was the 2009 film Zombieland, which they created and also executive-produced. The film was released by Sony Pictures on October 2, 2009, and became the highest-grossing zombie film at the time. Reese and Wernick followed Zombieland with Paramount Pictures' G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013), starring Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum, and Bruce Willis. The sequel outperformed the original, grossing $375 million. In February 2012, it was announced Universal Studios had acquired Reese and Wernick's script for a feature film adaptation of Cowboy Ninja Viking. In September 2012, their original science fiction spec screenplay Epsilon was sold to Sony Pictures, with plans to co-produce with Michael De Luca. In April 2015, Reese and Wernick had optioned Thomas Oliver's book The Real Coke, The Real Story to produce a film about the failed launch of New Coke.
In November 5, 2016, Reese married actress, writer and producer Chelsey Crisp. By 2017, they were living in Los Angeles. In a January 2020 interview, Reese said that they had recently purchased a condominium in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Crisp gave birth to their first child in January 2022, and later gave birth to their second child.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
