A filmmaker’s representation rarely counts as news, yet the company a director keeps tends to telegraph the films he means to make next. Julius Onah is finishing an intimate art-house portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat immediately after piloting a Marvel tentpole, and that whiplash is the whole point: he is a director determined to keep one foot in four-quadrant IP and the other in specialty prestige. His decision to sign with Theresa Kang is the infrastructure for exactly that double life.

As Deadline first reported, Onah has joined Blue Marble Management for representation across film, television and all media. Kang is not a conventional agent. She spent 17 years at WME, becoming its first Asian American partner, before walking away to build Blue Marble as a hybrid — a management shingle bolted to Blue Marble Pictures, a production company with an overall deal at Apple and the diaspora epic Pachinko to its name. Her client list — Alfonso Cuarón, Simon Beaufoy, Lena Waithe, Gillian Flynn — reads less like a roster than a mission statement about authored work.

For Onah, the logic is structural. His path ran from The Girl Is in Trouble, executive-produced by Spike Lee, through J.J. Abrams’ The Cloverfield Paradox and the Sundance breakout Luce before Captain America: Brave New World handed him the keys to a franchise. A manager who also produces can originate material rather than merely place a client into someone else’s development slate — precisely the leverage a director needs when he wants to alternate between studio scale and personal cinema without being typecast as either a blockbuster hand or an art-house one.

The timing is not incidental. Onah is in post-production on Samo Lives, a Basquiat biopic for Neon produced alongside Fifth Season and Macro, with Kelvin Harrison Jr. — his own Luce lead — playing the artist. The ensemble carries its own echoes: Jeffrey Wright, who embodied Basquiat in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film, joins Antony Starr, Chase Sui Wonders, Dane DeHaan and Danny Ramirez, the last fresh from Onah’s own Captain America. It is the kind of prestige swing that a boutique built for authored films is designed to protect.

Kang made her name on Pachinko, a multigenerational story about survival across borders; Onah is chasing a painter who signed his earliest canvases SAMO before the art world had learned his name. Both are wagering that the industry still has room for films with a pulse — even when the financing arrives from Marvel and Apple.

Tags: executive-move, Blue Marble Management, Julius Onah, Samo Lives, Theresa Kang