Last month there was a report in the NY Post that Jimmy Kimmel's show was likely to end next year.
Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show is expected to come to an end in 2027, we hear, with sources telling Page Six that next season of ABC’s late night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will be the last.
“His contract is not getting extended,” a source familiar with the situation explained.
ABC denied it at the time and no other outlet backed up the Post's report. But today there are new stories circulating about Kimmel future after Disney President Dana Walden was asked about whether his show would be renewed next year.
Initially, Walden said she was not going to make any news about that topic but then wound up doing so anyway.
“I’m not going to make that announcement here with you today,” Walden said. “Again, I’m letting Casey make the news.” (Bloys, the head of HBO and HBO Max, is the presumptive front-runner to head up streaming at the combined Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery when that megamerger closes in the coming days.)
The interviewer then took another approach and asked Walden why re-upping Kimmel's show wasn't just a given at this point.
“The truth is, it’s a very challenging daypart,” Walden said Thursday at the Bloomberg event.
In case that didn't make sense to you (it didn't to me), "daypart" is media speak for the various parts of the day which all appeal to different TV viewers. In this case, she's saying that late night in general is a very challenging "daypart" because none of the late night shows are really doing that well. She then went on to get more specific about Kimmel's ratings.
“That’s not to say that Jimmy is not doing a phenomenal job, and his ratings are up. But they’re up relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”
Kimmel and the show also have a big presence on YouTube and social media platforms, but those views and clicks bring in a fraction of the revenue that on-air advertising does. “That is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show,” said Walden.
In other words, Kimmel gets tons of clicks on YouTube but those don't bring in "premium talk show" money. So his show has cultural impact but financially it's struggling because many fewer people are watching live television these days.
ABC has claimed that Kimmel's show does make money but we know that his rival at CBS, Stephen Colbert, was losing $40 to $50 million per year. Kimmel's show has a budget that is reportedly the same or slightly more than Colbert's show, so it's not really clear to me how Kimmel is making money if Colbert was losing $40 million a year.
And it's worth noting that Kimmel himself disputed the claim that Colbert was losing money, claiming that CBS was only looking at traditional ad revenue and not counting other revenue streams. Here's what he told Variety.
I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert‘s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical. These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know they don’t know what they’re talking about. They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions — probably in total billions — and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows. It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works. There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year? I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.
So it's interesting that the president of Disney is now basically saying that the math for these shows is challenging. There have been reports that Kimmel was asked to cut $20 million from his show's budget to keep it on the air.
...here’s what’s actually going on. After returning from his usual summer break at the end of August, Kimmel informed Disney/ABC that he’d like to re-up for another season beyond the current deal’s end in May...Debra OConnell, chair of Disney Entertainment Television and the lead executive over ABC, has since been talking to Kimmel’s longtime agent, James “Baby Doll” Dixon, to begin the negotiation. It’s early, and I’m told both sides are saying they want to make a deal, but OConnell had a stern message for Baby Doll: They’ll need to cut the budget.
Not a shock. Per two sources, JKL! costs about as much to produce as the $100 million a year CBS was paying to make The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which was canceled by CBS last fall right before David Ellison’s Skydance closed its $8 billion acquisition of Paramount. The exact dollar amount of OConnell’s requested cuts is still T.B.D., but a strong source close to the situation told me 20 percent of the current budget was a fair estimate. Not insignificant, and a big ask for a show like JKL!—which, like Colbert, has already been trimming costs in recent years.
So the show probably wasn't canceled but has been asked to take a 20 percent haircut or it could be. The math just doesn't work for the current format.
I don't know if Disney's president was just spelling that out to improve her negotiating position or if she was hinting that the show is actually in danger. But either way, it sounds like Kimmel's show is going to take a hit and he may take one personally as well. Kimmel allegedly makes somewhere around $15 million a year to host the show. So if he's looking at a 20 percent cut that's about $3 million a year.
Here's the interview with Dana Walden, cued up to the question about Kimmel's show.
Editor’s Note: Hollywood, academia, and liberal elites are out of touch with the average American.
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