Judge Judy has it made in the shade. Not only is she the most attractive 74 year old on the planet (you would bro. I would too.), but she’s also the highest paid person in the reality genre. Judy Sheindlin pulls in $47 million a year from CBS’s top-rated Judge Judy, which nearly doubles the second place finisher–Matt Lauer from the Today Show who earns $22-25 million. Not a bad a payday for someone who sits down all day telling mouth breathers they’re fucking stupid.
Judge Judy has been running strong for 21 seasons, with an estimated 10 million people tuning in daily (including my mother). The show will stop producing more episodes in 2020 and now Sheindlin is shopping around the catalog in hopes of pocketing $200 million from the show, according to Page Six.
$200 million seems like an egregious amount of money for a show that looks like it was produced in a basement. Some skeptics believe that Judy’s ask is far more than what her library is worth.
“The company didn’t necessarily think [the library] was that valuable,” a source told The Hollywood Reporter. “There had been some tire-kicking over the years with either cable or [subscription video on demand] people to see if anyone wanted her shows, and I don’t think the response was overwhelmingly big.”
Another insider said, “Is it sellable? Yes. Is it sellable for hundreds of millions of dollars? I don’t think so.”
Still the source added, “But I always go back to Ted Turner. Everybody said he’d lost his mind when he paid $1.5 billion or whatever he paid for the MGM library, and then he created two networks out of it and all of a sudden he was a genius.”
The best time to marry Judge Judy is now. Once, God forbid, she kicks the can, one lucky dude will have more money than the GDP of most countries. BRB while I’ll slide into her DMs.
[h/t Page Six]