Cavalry Media Is In Bad Financial Straits
EXCLUSIVE: The management/production company Cavalry Media appears to be circling the drain. We’re hearing that the company co-founded by Keegan Rosenberger and the recently exited Dana Brunetti is in financial chaos. How desperate is it? The firm’s 14-person staff have not been paid in months, and they have been without benefits for that long.
Some employees are owed as much as $50K to a half-million in back pay and commissions. While staffers have been promised by Rosenberger and Cavalry CFO Reid Rogers that more money is on its way in pending deals, they are tired of hearing excuses. They believe the cavalry isn’t coming, and that the company has blown through a majority of its $14M seed funding. Legal suits to get backpay are mobilizing, Deadline hears.
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Cavalry’s Rosenberger defends that he’s making a big acquisition in the audio space and that more cash is on its way to right the ship here.
“The company is not in a state of financial distress,” Rosenberger told Deadline this afternoon.
“We have not been notified of a single wage claim or received anything from third party counsel,” he added. Before Cavalry, Rosenberger previously headed strategy and corporate development at Relativity Media.
Morale has bottomed out within the ranks. Staffers and their families are under financial distress having to either borrow to stay afloat or live off savings to pay their mortgages or kids’ tuition. Cavalry staffers are currently at a stalemate with Rosenberger, having been advised by counsel to stay on to keep the meter on the wage claims they’ve filed against the company. A legal rep for Cavalry staffers provided no comment to Deadline.
The honest thing to do would be for Cavalry to let staff go, however, once they do, they’d be facing backpay for the whole company plus penalties. Staff is now trying to find new jobs and extract whatever projects they can from the company. Brunetti is the only staffer to date who has left the company as Deadline first reported. Rosenberger, we understand, is not drawing a salary from the company.
Some were told by senior management that commission monies had been deposited. In order for them to receive it, they would need to remove their wage claims. Staffers aren’t biting.
Cavalry employees were informed last Halloween that their health insurance was ending the following day. Some believe the company didn’t pay for health insurance even before that date. The last paycheck for some came on Dec. 30, with no paychecks since.
Sources believe that of the $14M of Cavalry’s seed money, $9M has been spent between development and overhead. Deadline was shown a bank statement from a Tiger Media Holdings, a joint operation account between Cavalry and its financial partner Titan with a balance of $2.85 million.
Said one staffer when illuminated to such information, “If they have that amount of money, why isn’t anybody getting paid?”
Those stiffed include third party vendors such as social media and podcast editors, as well as talent who host podcasts. More irony: Cavalry Media doesn’t have any offices with the firm working remotely since the pandemic. Meaning, there’s no costly monthly rental.
Other gripes we’ve heard is that Cavalry engaged in hiring vendors and employees, and even encouraged staff to secure IP, when they didn’t have the finances to cover such obligations. This has left many of those who work for Cavalry Media in an embarrassing position with talent reps and industry executives.
Cavalry Media hasn’t had any TV series or films that had been released. Some of that might be attributed to Covid. In the podcast space, Cavalry has Art Fraud, X Marks the Spot: The Legend of Forrest Fenn, and the Oscar Isaac-Edgar Castillo podcast The Rosenberg Case. Art Fraud remains in development with a screenplay by Wells Tower as a movie with Netflix. Other series in development include Motorheads at Amazon Studios and The Devil Within at Epix.
Cavalry Media has also been named as a defendant in various suits related to the film Rust, but we’re told they weren’t a producer on the doomed western production (nor its upcoming continued shoot). Cavalry has been named in Rust suits given that star/producer Alec Baldwin and director Joel Souza are clients of the firm. That said, Cavalry Media is looking to get out of the talent management business and turn its attention toward more content creation. This despite the fact that its two income streams are commissions and podcasts.
Cavalry Media was founded in 2018 with the mission of making moderately priced premium film and TV series for linear and new media platforms in the $40M-to $80M range.
We will keep you posted on what happens next.
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