After graduating from USC, Sonnier obtained a job with
United Talent Agency, beginning in the mailroom and working his way up to Agent Trainee. After a few years, he left the agency to join a start-up management firm run by David Schiff. In 2008, Sonnier and Jack Heller, a USC classmate, founded Caliber Media. While attending
San Diego Comic-Con, the pair met former wrestler
Stone Cold Steve Austin, eventually collaborating with him on nine low-budget action movies that were sold to distributors and premiered on DVD and video-on-demand. Caliber segued into other independent projects, before raising funds for two years in order to shoot
Bone Tomahawk; the script had been written by one of the pair's clients,
S. Craig Zahler, whom they had been managing for two years. Zahler's script attracted
Kurt Russell and
Richard Jenkins, but the interested financiers wanted the script shortened. After several years of negotiations, Russell's agents were ready to move on if the movie was not fully financed in a matter of months. To secure financing for the film, in 2014, Sonnier took a new mortgage on his house. The film failed at the box office, but found success in ancillary markets like DVD sales and VOD rentals. Following production on
Bone Tomahawk, Sonnier departed Caliber to found Cinestate, a production company based in Dallas, with the intention of bringing film production to Texas. Sonnier would go on to collaborate with Zahler for two more films:
Brawl in Cell Block 99 and
Dragged Across Concrete. In 2022, Sonnier became a key architect for the entertainment division of
conservative news website and
media company The Daily Wire. ==Production philosophy==