The 75 Most Powerful People in Kids’ Entertainment:

In terms of the sheer number of entertainment options, there’s never been a better time to be a kid. But it’s also never been more work.

The average 8-year-old in 2013 could turn on one of a few TV channels and park there for an hour or two, and maybe watch a few movies or shows on Netflix or Hulu (in the not-very-likely event their families had an account). YouTube was for teenagers and adults.

A decade later, an 8-year-old can choose from hundreds of titles across a host of streaming platforms and thousands of YouTube channels — as well as an age-protected YouTube Kids app — to say nothing of TikTok and other social media. The shift to streaming is even more pronounced among kids and teenagers than it is in adults: Where a popular network or cable show can still draw maybe half a million adults ages 18-34, no cable program in the 2022-23 season averaged even half that many viewers among the 2-17 cohort. In 2015, Cartoon Network, Disney Channel and Nickelodeon averaged 500,000 or more viewers ages 2-11 each day. Now the total daily audience (kids and adults) for each network is less than 200,000.

On streaming, meanwhile, kids and teens spent 12.7 billion minutes — almost 217 million hours — watching a single movie, Disney’s Encanto, in 2022, according to Nielsen. Kids 11 and younger watched 108 billion minutes of just the top 20 streaming titles.

As the world comes out of the pandemic and more families return to movie theaters, kid-friendly films are starting to prosper once again. The Super Mario Bros. Movie is the top-grossing film of 2023 so far, with children driving an impressive chunk of its $1 billion-plus worldwide take. Fellow family films The Little Mermaid and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish are also in the top 10 domestically so far.

Kids also spend countless hours consuming media on other platforms, often featuring stars no older than they are. YouTube channels like Kids Diana Show, Ryan’s World and Like Nastya are among the platform’s most popular and have amassed tens of millions of followers by showcasing preteen influencers speaking directly to their own age groups.

Yet even as there’s more content than ever at a child’s fingertips, the market for original programming aimed at kids is tightening. Streamers spent a lot of money bulking up their rosters of kids and family programming during the free-spending days of the mid- and late 2010s, but as first the pandemic and then a shaky economy forced cuts, the companies pulled back, canceling a number of original shows and letting acquired titles like Bluey and Cocomelon do the heavy lifting. (Feature films are in a steadier space, with Pixar’s Elemental, Disney’s Wish and DreamWorks Animation’s Trolls Band Together all due in theaters by the end of the year; Elemental bows June 16.)

While animation (for kids and adults) has boomed in recent years, live-action shows for kids and teens — the sitcoms that incubated the careers of Selena Gomez, Ariana Grande and Miranda Cosgrove, among others — have fallen by the wayside (with some notable exceptions, including Alaya High on Nickelodeon’s That Girl Lay Lay, starring this issue’s cover subject). That’s reflected in the power list that follows, which features a host of creators and execs working in animation but relatively few in the live-action space. That said, 2024 will bring arguably the biggest swing at attracting kids and family audiences that a network or streamer has ever attempted in Disney+’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians, a series reboot based on author Rick Riordan’s best-selling and beloved series of middle-grade novels.

The pressures affecting the industry at large — fractured audiences, the tension between keeping content flowing and the cost of doing so, improving representation onscreen and behind the scenes — are just as real in the kids’ sector. The people making programming for children and teens, and the executives deciding when and how to deliver it, also have to deal with the fact that every few years their audience ages into a different segment of their marketplace (or out of it altogether), and the need to impart lessons to their viewers on everything from the scientific method to showing empathy.

The people on The Hollywood Reporter’s first-ever Kids’ Entertainment Power List are navigating all those challenges to make the best and biggest programming — whether they’re feature films or shortform internet videos — for the youngest viewers. Kids are “wickedly sophisticated,” says Warner Bros. Animation, Cartoon Network Studios and Hanna-Barbera Studios Europe president Sam Register. The executives and creators, grown-up and pint-size, on this list are leading the charge to meet those kids where they are.

View this article at The Hollywood Reporter.