Who's up? Who's down? This year, EW's Power Issue takes a new approach to tracking the rise and fall of entertainment's most riveting players.
The list is history.
Our 15th annual Power Issue features a big change: For the first time, you won't find a numerical ranking. When we created our list in 1990, power - how to get it, keep it, and most importantly, take it away from the next guy - was a blood sport in Hollywood. Michael Douglas' greed-is-good speech from 1987's Wall Street was still ringing in our ears and Michael Ovitz was using The Art of War to turn CAA into the center of the entertaiment universe.
Don't get us wrong: 14 years later, power remains the currency of the realm. But a ranked list isn't as relevant. For one thing, as a culture, we're no longer enthralled by those so-called "Masters of the Universe." And ordering 100 of them from top to bottom seems kind of beside the point - it'd be like comparing apples and oranges, Sopranos and Corleones, J. Lo's and Jay-Z's.
So we've rejiggered our list to hone in on what we think you really want to know: Who gained - or lost - power in the last year, and how did that happen? Rather than revisit the ever-powerful (yes, Oprah is still a force, but no more so than in 2003), we've chosen to focus on the movers and shakers whose careers and lives changed dramatically in the last 12 months. This year's players range from our maverick cover subject to Dave Chappelle, comedy's $50 million man, to independent film's guru, Harvey Weinstein. Their stories are, in our opinion, the most compelling of 2004.
After 20 years of mincing and Methodizing in the margins, this was the year that Depp's career of quirky gambles finally hit the jackpot. Aside from being very lucrative for both Disney and himself (Hello, sequel money!), Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl gave Depp his first Oscar nod (and Finding Neverland looks like a good bet for a second), as well as the juice to launch Infinitum Nihil, his very own production company - a future hotbed, we're sure, of quirk.
