If the first few days of January are any indication, 2025 is going to be a rock ‘em, sock ‘em year across the media and entertainment landscape.
In advance of Variety’s Entertainment Summit on Jan. 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — our annual gathering where we assess the year that just wrapped and look ahead at what’s to come — today we formally unveil this year’s Variety 500. This is our annual global compendium of showbiz leaders and movers and shakers across TV, film, music, gaming, digital media, entertainment-related technology and other Hollywood-adjacent disciplines.
In the eighth year of Variety 500, we’ve added two categories — Marketers and Podcasters/Audio — that reflect the crosscurrents of the business in 2025 and have become new sources of power for executives and creatives. Effective marketing across myriad channels has never been more crucial to the success of TV series, movies, music, video games — basically any content that needs to break through the ocean of options that consumers have at their fingertips 24/7.
Popular on Variety
And after the roller-coaster ride of the 2024 presidential election, establishing a category for podcasters and audio executives was the easiest decision that we made for Variety 500 this time around.
RELATED CONTENT: THE VARIETY 500 GALLERY
A sampling of newcomers to the list this year and their categories:
François-Henri Pinault (Moguls): The owner of CAA and the Kering brand group has big ambition to connect the threads of his world in entertainment, retail and fashion.
Zoe Saldaña (Talent): A 21st century star who is as conversant in blockbusters as she is in avant-garde fare such as “Emilia Pérez.” (And we made this choice before Saldaña and the movie cleaned up at the Golden Globe Awards.)
Joe Rogan (Podcasters/Audio): Not since the heyday of Walter Winchell has one man with a mic exerted such influence on politics and culture.
Celine Song (Directors): The Korean Canadian writer-director made such an artistic statement with 2023’s “Past Lives,” which nabbed an Oscar nomination for best picture and for original screenplay, that she is sure to be a force in global cinema.
Shannon Ryan (Marketers): The president of marketing for Disney Entertainment Television oversees a content promotion machine that operates at unprecedented scale, given the breadth of Disney’s assets.
Jensen Huang (Moguls): The CEO of Nvidia has been focused on building microchips to power AI tools since Bill Clinton was in the White House — before most of us had any idea what artificial intelligence actually was.