Ryan Seacrest knows he’s bigger than he ever imagined being, which is why he doesn’t want to pay someone else a 10% comission for his hard work. Ryan Seacrest left William Morris yesterday amid commision conflicts and was gobbled up quickly by the biggest fish in the Hollywood sea, Creative Artist Agency. Ryan had been a client of William Morris before their rocky merger with Endeavor which made them lose a lot of their big name talent. At first WME, was going to swallow a lower commission to keep their big names but WME refused to cut Ryan a special deal so he walked from the agency that repped him for 15 years! Sassy!
“When he pushed back, WME said, ‘We can’t represent you then. Either stay and pay full commission and together we’ll keep growing and expanding and servicing your reality business. Or leave.’” That’s when Seacrest took a meeting at CAA. By the end of day yesterday, Seacrest hadn’t yet made a decision to leave WME. (Some say he was pleased with the reality TV department there, other tell he wasn’t.) Today he left.
Lets do some math: He just signed a 45 million American Idol contract, plus his three year 21 million from E!, that’s about 6.6 million loss for WME. Not counting his projected future income it took a lot of balls to walk away from this cash cow.
Oh Hollywood….it’s always just business.
