Five years ago this August, a handful of the best and brightest agents from CAA and WME stunned the town by abruptly leaving high-profile jobs to start a new company that sought to be a hybrid between the agencies where they grew up, repping clients as managers. Even before the major agencies were driven out of packaging and affiliated production businesses after a long WGA standoff, management companies bore fewer shackles in areas like the ability to produce and were able to be more hands on and entrepreneurial in helping clients be the same.
Range was a company born out of the pandemic, which shut down Hollywood and gave entrepreneurial dealmakers time to confront the existential question: Is this all there is for me? On August 23, 2020, Deadline revealed that former CAA and eOne exec Peter Micelli, CAA talent agents Jack Whigham, Michael Cooper, Mick Sullivan and Dave Bugliari, WME lit agent Rich Cook, Byron Wetzel, Rachel Kropa, Sandra Kang, Matt Graham and Natalie Bruss came together to form Range Media Partners, taking most of their high-profile client lists with them.
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For a town still emerging from the devastating Covid quarantine that reduced agency revenues from production and live events to a trickle, the venture was a seismic risk. Nothing like this had been attempted in 25 years, and Range’s Micelli termed it a third revolution, harkening to a couple of covert formations that transformed the rep business. That would be CAA’s creation in 1975 by Mike Ovitz, Ron Meyer and a few others who left WME, and later when Ari Emanuel, Tom Strickler and others exited ICM to form Endeavor in 1995. Endeavor would go on to swallow William Morris, turning CAA vs. WME into the rep business’s version of Coke vs. Pepsi.
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Range started out on strong footing, with major investment by hedge fund titan and future New York Mets owner Steve Cohen. Disruption always creates chaos and bitterness. While Emanuel wished those leaving for Range well, noting he would be a hypocrite to feel otherwise, the CAA braintrust had the opposite reaction. The agency sued Range, an ongoing lawsuit that claims, among other things, that exiting partners didn’t deserve equity they held in the agency, and asks the courts to decide whether Range is a management company or an agency in disguise. It is worth noting that despite that litigation, CAA and Range share about 125 clients.
For some of the founders interviewed for this article, the inspiration for Range was Micelli’s passion, but also speeches by two of their former bosses, delivered at the height of the pandemic. Both speeches stoked the entrepreneurial fire of these best and brightest dealmakers by urging them to not wait to chase your dreams. Covid showed that nothing was guaranteed.
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“I’ll never forget, ironically, of all things, Richard Lovett giving a speech that summer on Zoom and saying, Covid is teaching us don’t wait, don’t wait to chase your dreams,” Whigham says. “Then, days later, we had an agent leaving to go become a manager, and Kevin Huvane gave this really inspiring speech about, we want you to be able to go off and pursue your dreams, because that’s what we did, you know? And I took both of those speeches to heart, and we thought, you know, we learned so much here, that there’s other ways to do business, and I don’t know. I was inspired by that.”
Fast forward to 2025. Range has gone from a small group of reps working out of Micelli’s house in the Hollywood Hills to a tiered company featuring three other offices across the country (as well as an international office in London). Its headquarters in Santa Monica is something to see. It was designed by celebrated director and Range client Luca Guadagnino, so excited by his rep’s new venture that he created a wide-open workspace with different styles and a fishbowl second floor conference room. The aura is a hip, wide-open two-floor plan that breaks down traditional barriers, is inclusive and invites collaboration.
“Once Rich got me into the newly chosen headquarters of Range, then we started dreaming of me and my studio of interior design to contribute a creation of the new spaces,” Guadagnino says.
The director teamed with his project manager, Pablo Molezum, to co-author the idea of what the space would look like and chose “a mid-century modernism mixed with the Hitchcockian flair for surfaces and color blocking.” As for the similarities between designing an office space and designing a shot in a film, Guadagnino says its hard not to see the two things sharing common ground when it comes to the people inhabiting both spaces.
“When you design a space you think of the living people that will inhabit it and you must prioritize the lived in experience,” he says. “In designing a cinematic space you think both at the imagery built in the mind of the spectator and at the dynamicism of the permances inhabiting the designed space.”
While the unique office space and long roster of A-list clients make Range a power player among the typical representation company, how it help clients’ professional aspirations as well as their passion plays is what the team values the most. In fact, the name of the company is what the founders ultimately wanted to deliver to their clients, and how they came to it in the first place.
“The reason we call the company Range is, we don’t look at, you’re not just an actor, you’re not just a musician. you’re not just an athlete. You’re a creative person with a community, and how do we help create value around the community you have,” says Micelli. “And you know, that’s why we call it Range.”
In 2023, Halle Berry was entering the offices of Range Media Partners for an exploratory meeting that turned into something more then the usual one-on-one between client and potential rep. Midway through the conversation, Berry brought up her ongoing journey through perimenopause, that it wasn’t discussed enough in the open, and that the stigma and disconnect had moved her to speak more about it both publicly (in interviews as well as more recently on her health and wellness media website Respin, which she had soft-launched during Covid).
Her candid comments in the meeting sparked excitement for the Range team in the room, who cited a deep dive Range had recently put together with similar thinking, largely focused on how the topic of menopause (and women’s longevity overall) was an opportunity that hadn’t been meaningfully addressed in the space. Half the world’s population will go through the experience (more than 60 million women are currently experiencing symptoms in the U.S. alone), and yet at the time the topic accounted for less than 6% of women’s health venture funding.
Over the ensuing months, Berry and an extended team (including managing partner Natalie Bruss and partners Mahmoud Youssef, Amia Lazarus and Carol Goll) worked to build out a broader brand vision and business strategy around how to “own the lane” around Berry’s key insight — that in standing up and advocating for better care for herself, she could positively impact the lives of many more.
Roughly 18 months later, in February 2025, Berry launched Respin with nationally televised appearances on Today and with Drew Barrymore. Now supported by a founding team of healthcare and media veterans, and multimillion-dollar seed round backing by leading investors and partners Khosla Ventures (early backers in OpenAI), Night Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Able Partners, Range and more, Respin’s launch week also celebrated the completion of a pilot product designed by menopause clinicians, scientists, and holistic experts — with 90% of participants reporting symptom improvement and nearly two-thirds of participants reporting clinically significant improvement in just weeks.
Now dubbed “The Respin Reset,” the three-month program incorporates more than 500 scientific studies, analyzes 150-plus health factors, and utilizes group and private coaching sessions with experts to deliver a dynamic, tailored care program built by leading doctors and scientists.
While Berry has played a seismic role in Respin’s growth, the contributions by Range are just one example of how the company has shown it can disrupt the industry when it comes to repping talent in an ever-changing landscape.
Another example of that is Shane Gillis, and how his recent Bud Light ad campaign has been more then a typical run-of-the-mill celebrity endorsement. In 2023, the beer company was dealing with some tough times after they teamed with TikTok influencer and trans activist Dylan Mulvaney to promote the brand’s Easy Carry Contest. Mulvaney’s involvement immediately sparked outrage from right-wing commentators, who went after the brand for working with a transgender influencer; at one point, a video featuring Kid Rock blowing away three cases of Bud Light with a semi-automatic rifle and screaming “f*ck Bud Light” into a camera went viral.
“I mean, they were really in trouble and their market share was down and they were trying to find the right person that was authentic to the brand,” says Carol Goll, head of Range’s endorsements division.
Enter Gillis, a top stand-up comedian — and a Bud Light enthusiast — who Range suggested to the beer company as the ideal choice to help turn things around. Anheuser-Busch eventually allowed Range’s production team and Gillis to come up with and write the spots, ultimately producing the ads in which he appeared in during the 2024 college football season.
“I’ve never in all my years have had that type of creative control and storytelling from a company, and they wanted that,” Goll says. “And so the fact that they were so open to that, and they took the guardrails off and we worked together, and really allowed Shane to let his creative voice speak and then did so well, I mean, it was a test for them. They never had done that before.”
The partnership culminated in a high-profile Super Bowl spot with Gillis and Post Malone promoting the beer in what turned into one of the big game’s biggest hits. It was also one of five produced Bud Light commercials in which Range’s endorsement division was involved.
In the meantime, Range has a number departments and divisions that have made big strides in a short amount of time. A list of accomplishments they have completed in fewer than five years includes:
- Representing hundreds of client over film and TV that has continued grow each year.
- Forming a strategic partnership with A+E Networks that led to its domestic TV scripted division.
- Launching Range Sports in late 2022 run by Will Funk and Greg Luckman that has grown into a serious player in the sports representation world following the hire of football agent Kyle Strongin.
- Launching a music publishing division in late 2023 with the hiring of Casey Robison to capture revenue from the $7 billion-plus industry.
- Forming a film division through the merger with Automatik in 2023.
There have also been a fair share of hurdles Range has had to overcome including 2023’s WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and the very public profits suit filed by some of the founders against their former CAA bosses over what they are owed in equity. Regarding the suit, Whigham is brief in his remarks about the arbitration but adds that even with how public the suit has been, it hasn’t caused issues with the nearly 125 clients the two companies co-rep.
“The leadership has chosen there to take certain actions, which I think we’d say are disappointing, but we compartmentalize it really well, and we absolutely love our working relationship with the company at large,” Whigham says.
Even as they await the outcome of the case, the company was still able to celebrate being in the black at the end of 2024, though it was a milestone that was not easy to achieve as the strikes led to a 12-month stoppage in cash flow that was not just a Range problem but an issue felt throughout the industry. The company was profitable for the last four months of 2024 and through the new year.
Micelli says new revenue streams have helped grow the company, with a big 2025 expected.
“We wanted to keep growing, and Carol Goll has done an amazing job on the endorsement side, and it’s a real positive for us,” Micelli says. “And then we have a couple other innovative revenue streams that are now starting to really prove incredibly valuable for us, in terms of a balanced, dynamic platform.”
As for the future of Range, much depends on what happens in the industry as various elements of the biz are either at or coming to a crossroad. Even so, Cook believes as long as there is creativity and people who put in the work — not just at Range but across the entire industry — then the opportunities are endless.
“More than ever — the business demands a higher degree of hustle and creativity and that really motivates all the divisions across Range,” Cook says. “There is tremendous opportunity on the horizon and we’re going to continue to grow strategically and synergistically as the industry evolves. We’re committed to raising the bar for our clients, creating an inspiring workplace for our colleagues and having an absolute blast as we build. We won’t have it any other way.”