Entertainment’s Biggest Business Leaders in 2025
If the first few days of January are any indication, 2025 will be a rock-’em-sock-em year in the media and entertainment landscape.
In advance of Variety‘s Entertainment Summit on January 8 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – our annual gathering where we review the year just completed and look ahead to what’s to come – today we formally unveil this year’s annual results Variety 500. This is our annual global compendium of showbiz leaders and movers and shakers in TV, film, music, gaming, digital media, entertainment-related technology and other Hollywood-related disciplines.
In the eighth year of Variety 500, we added two categories – Marketers and Podcasters/Audio – that reflect the cross-currents of the business in 2025 and have become new sources of power for executives and creatives. Effective marketing across countless channels has never been more crucial to the success of TV shows, movies, music and video games – basically any content that aims to cut through the ocean of options that consumers have at their fingertips 24/7.
And after the rollercoaster ride of the 2024 presidential election, creating a category for podcasters and audio managers was the easiest decision we made. Variety 500 this time.
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A selection of the newcomers to the list this year and their categories:
François-Henri Pinault (Moguls): The owner of CAA and the Kering brand group has a great ambition to connect the threads of his world in entertainment, retail and fashion
Zoe Saldaña (Talent): A 21st century star who is as familiar with blockbusters as he is with avant-garde fare like ‘Emilia Pérez’. (And we made this pick before Saldaña and the film cleaned up at the Golden Globe Awards.)
Joe Rogan (Podcasters/Audio): Since the heyday of Walter Winchell, one man with a microphone has had such an influence on politics and culture.
Celine Song (Directors): The Korean-Canadian writer-director has made such an artistic statement with 2023’s ‘Past Lives,’ which earned an Oscar nomination for best picture and original screenplay, that she’s certainly a force will be in global cinema.
Shannon Ryan (Marketers): The marketing president of Disney Entertainment Television oversees a content promotion machine that operates on an unprecedented scale given the size of Disney’s assets.
Jensen Huang (Moguls): Nvidia’s CEO 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.
