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Hollywood has been smiling all summer long, and not just because of the box office revival. There’s also silent gratitude for the cloud cover provided by Paramount’s ongoing attempt to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger has been sucking the oxygen out of the industry for months, making it nearly impossible to pay attention to other problem areas lurking in town.
But even a spotlight-loving state attorney general and David Ellison’s ambition can’t distract from the noise around United Talent Agency. The 35-year-old representation shop, considered part of Hollywood’s Big Three agencies alongside larger rivals CAA and WME, has faced recent headlines about client departures — notably comedian and Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser and podcast queen Alex Cooper.
A closer look shows that Glaser’s and Cooper’s exits follow several major client losses over the past three years — including whales like Greta Gerwig, Ben Stiller, Kevin Hart and Judd Apatow. Parallel to client exits, the agency hasn’t been immune to consolidation pressure facing the media sector. In July, UTA kicked the tires on merging with The Team (formerly Wasserman) in an attempt to scale up, four insiders with knowledge of the discussions tell Variety. It’s fueled chatter about the agency’s future at industry lunch tables and on text-message threads as power players ride out the dog days of August.
So is UTA just having a bummer summer or is there larger cause for alarm? Variety spoke to 10 top sources from the major studios, management companies, private equity firms and other intersecting businesses to find out.
“It’s not good,” says one top dealmaker at a rival firm, speaking on condition of anonymity. “But is it fatal? No. Clients come and go.”
Indeed, Glaser’s defection to WME shocked many inside UTA’s Beverly Hills headquarters, three insiders say. No single event led to the breakup, two of the sources add, but rather the parties slowly drifted apart. Glaser’s profile has risen considerably since her knockout performance on Netflix’s 2024 roast of Tom Brady and her first time hosting the Globes in 2025. She also spent the better part of this year on the film set of “The Fifth Wheel” bonding with co-star Kim Kardashian (a WME client whose agent Brad Slater is so essential to her life and work that he’s appeared on her Hulu reality show).
The departure of Cooper, co-founder of the Gen-Z podcast empire Unwell, was seen as inevitable, per numerous sources. Cooper has been embroiled in a public feud with Alix Earle, an influencer and podcaster once distributed by Unwell, who is also a UTA client. Multiple media reports last month said that Cooper had no interest in staying under the same agency roof as Earle, which Variety confirmed with two sources familiar with UTA. Cooper will presumably land at CAA, whose primary mission will be building a premium film and TV production entity in her name. (Her lucrative podcast efforts will not be commissioned by her new agency, two other insiders say.)
UTA chief executive David Kramer is not in denial about the optics around the agency. Two insiders say he addressed multiple departments inside the agency last week, admitting that the losses hurt for those who helped build the careers of Glaser and Cooper, but he also emphasized the importance of moving on.
“It’s not like the old ICM,” says one C-suite film executive, referring to ICM Partners in the post-pandemic period before its 2022 sale to CAA. Those were fraught days inside ICM where the source says you’d wonder “if the phones would still ring when you called.”
UTA has never had a stronghold with big movie star clients, with one key exception: Timothée Chalamet. Some pessimists think Chalamet may be vulnerable to poaching given recent headlines, but others reject the idea. Chalamet’s longtime manager Brian Swardstrom, a former UTA partner, is said to be content with the status quo (and there’s no love lost between Swardstrom and either his former employer WME or CAA, another source says). Swardstrom did not return a request for comment.
Where UTA excels is in breaking and building exciting new filmmakers. The agency’s director roster is full of heat seekers like Curry Barker (“Obsession”), Chloe Domont (“Fair Play”), Jordan Firstman (“Club Kid”), Noah Segan (“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”) and Lance Oppenheim (“Primetime”). UTA is also home to the largest digital creators department that the agency invested in years before “attention economy” was a buzz phrase in advertising and long before the movie business woke up to the potential of YouTube-friendly directors like Barker and Markiplier. And in comedy, it has heat with next-gen touring stars including Nate Bargatze and Matt Rife.
Last month, rumors were flying that UTA would acquire or merge with The Team — the portfolio of sports, music and talent representation businesses formerly owned by Casey Wasserman. After a 2024 scandal erupted around the LA28 chair and his mention in the radioactive Epstein files, Wasserman put his ownership stake up for sale. UTA “opened the hood” on the company, one source directly familiar with the talks says, but failed to come to terms with The Team’s majority owner Providence Equity Partners, which wound up taking Wasserman’s stake for itself.
Multiple sources tell Variety to expect an increased ground game from UTA’s soldiers as film festivals ramp up in Venice, Telluride and Toronto. Where one agent might have attended a client’s premiere, expect two or three instead. The same goes for the coming awards season — when clients like Barker, Firstman and Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“Project Hail Mary”) will be in the mix for golden trophies.
Joe Otterson contributed to this report.
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