ABC Wants Kimmel Back at a 20 Percent Discount

ABC is negotiating another season of Jimmy Kimmel Live, and the price of staying is a cut of about 20 percent. The current deal still runs through May 2027.

A tabloid item this month said the show was finished. An ABC spokesperson called that report “inaccurate” and said talk about the show’s future was “purely speculative.” Hollywood reporter Matthew Belloni then wrote the live issue: Disney television chair Debra OConnell told Kimmel’s agent, James Dixon, that any new year comes with a smaller budget.

ABC Wants the Same Show for Less

Kimmel, 58, returned from a two-month summer break and told Disney he wants to come back past May. Both sides, Belloni wrote, say they want a deal. OConnell’s message to Dixon was blunt.

They’ll need to cut the budget.

Debra OConnell, as reported by Matthew Belloni, September 11, 2026

A source close to the talks called 20 percent of the current budget “a fair estimate.” Belloni wrote that Jimmy Kimmel Live costs roughly the same $100 million a year as CBS’s Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which the network shut down. Twenty percent of $100 million is $20 million. ABC has not put a public figure on the ask, and Kimmel’s camp has not said whether he will take it.

The show is in its 24th season on ABC, on air since a Super Bowl launch in January 2003. Last December, after a six-day suspension over remarks about the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Kimmel signed a one-year extension instead of the three-year papers that used to be normal. That short deal is the one now on the table.

A $100 Million Hour on a $51 Million Ad Book

The cut is arriving because the ad market that once paid for late-night has already left. Guideline, which tracks ad spending, puts network late-night ads at $439 million in 2018 and $220.6 million in 2024, a 49.8 percent drop. The same firm has the category at $519.7 million in 2017 and $209 million in 2025.

THE LATE-NIGHT MONEY PILE

• Show cost: Jimmy Kimmel Live is reported at about $100 million a year to produce.
• Kimmel’s ads: Guideline logged $51.1 million in spending on the show in 2024, 21 percent of that year’s late-night category by the firm’s count.
• Category 2025: Late-night ad spending across the remaining network shows fell to $209 million.
• CBS’s hole: The Late Show lost about $40 million a year, CBS said in May 2026 after the show had already ended.

Those figures do not prove ABC is losing money on Kimmel. In June, Kimmel said ABC had told him “quite specifically” that Jimmy Kimmel Live was still profitable, and he called CBS’s $40 million Late Show figure “made-up numbers.” A profitable show can still be too expensive for a company that is cutting 1,000 jobs and asking longtime executives to retire. The September ask is a cheaper year, not a public admission that the hour is in the red.

Digital clips do not close that gap on their own. The linear ads are what used to cover a writing staff, a house band, a Hollywood taping, guest bookings, and a host fee reported at about $15 million a year. Guideline’s 2024 number for Kimmel, $51.1 million, is about half the reported production cost before affiliate fees and streaming residuals are counted. Networks do count those extra dollars. They have not said they count enough of them to leave the budget alone.

What a 20 Percent Cut Would Hit First

A $20 million hole in a late-night budget does not come out of the set dressing. It comes out of people and days of production. NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers has already shown the pattern: the 8G Band was cut, and Meyers has taken long breaks to reduce tape weeks. Colbert’s show, before CBS killed the franchise, had already been trimmed and still employed about 200 people, with a live band and a $20 million host paycheck, according to people familiar with that operation.

WHERE A 20 PERCENT CUT HAS TO LAND

• Tape weeks: Fewer original nights, longer summer dark periods, and more guest hosts, a model ABC already used this summer with Jelly Roll, Rosie O’Donnell, and Colman Domingo.
• Staff: Writers, producers, and crew, the same below-the-line jobs Meyers reduced when the band went away.
• Remote weeks: Costly tapings away from the El Capitan Entertainment Centre on Hollywood Boulevard, the kind of stunt that inflates a season budget.
• The host fee: About $15 million a year, large enough to matter in a $20 million cut and small enough that it cannot cover the whole ask alone.

If Kimmel keeps his check and the show still has to lose 20 percent, the haircut falls on the people who make the 11:35 p.m. hour five nights a week. If he chips in, Disney still needs the rest from production. Either way, the next season, if there is one, is a smaller machine. Belloni noted the show has already been trimming costs, as Colbert’s had.

CBS Already Booked the Loss and Left

ABC is trying not to copy CBS. In July 2025, CBS said ending The Late Show was “purely a financial decision.” The franchise that David Letterman launched in 1993 went dark in May 2026. People familiar with the budget had put the annual hole at about $40 million on a production cost above $100 million. Kimmel spent a year calling that math nonsense, including the line that CBS had tried to sign Colbert to a long deal in 2023.

On May 28, 2026, CBS put the number on the record while defending the replacement, Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed, a time-buy in which Allen pays the network for the hour and sells the ads himself.

With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit, a $55 million swing.

CBS statement, May 28, 2026

Allen pays $15 million a year as a flat fee. CBS no longer carries the payroll. Comics Unleashed opened to 878,000 viewers the night after Colbert’s finale drew 6.74 million. Letterman called the people who sold Paramount to Skydance “lying weasels.” The books, as CBS published them, still showed a $55 million turnaround on paper.

Colbert’s hour had sold a lot of commercials before that turn. From its 2015 premiere through mid-2025, the show generated $1.7 billion in national TV ads. The annual figure still went the wrong way, and CBS chose an exit over another round of cuts. ABC, so far, is choosing the cuts.

One-Year Deals Replaced Three-Year Certainty

Kimmel’s paper got shorter before OConnell asked for the 20 percent. The December 2025 extension, first reported as a Bloomberg scoop and then confirmed by ABC, took a deal that had been due to lapse in May 2026 and pushed it to May 2027. Most of his earlier renewals had been multiyear. Comedy Central has Jon Stewart on a string of one-year Daily Show deals. NBC has Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers signed through 2028, a longer bet on The Tonight Show as the last sturdy franchise in the daypart.

HOW THE DEAL SHRANK

1. January 2003: Jimmy Kimmel Live premieres on ABC after the Super Bowl.
2. September 17, 2025: ABC suspends production after Kimmel’s on-air remarks about Charlie Kirk; Sinclair and Nexstar pull the show from their ABC stations.
3. September 23, 2025: Kimmel returns. Sinclair and Nexstar restore the program on September 26.
4. December 8, 2025: ABC signs a one-year extension through May 2027, replacing the old three-year pattern.
5. March 16, 2026: Debra OConnell is named chairman of Disney Entertainment Television as Josh D’Amaro becomes CEO.
6. May 2026: The Late Show ends. CBS later discloses the $40 million annual loss.
7. September 11, 2026: Talks for another Kimmel year are confirmed, with the 20 percent budget ask attached.

On Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, Kimmel and his wife, Molly McNearney, an executive producer of the show, talked through retirement without picking a date. “People make a big show of like ‘I’m done and I’m tired doing this’, and then they make a lesser comeback trying to do the same thing. That’s always a bummer,” Kimmel said. McNearney said the answer “changes.” A cheaper season is one more way the job can change before anyone uses the word retirement.

The 11:35 p.m. Shows That Are Still Standing

Kimmel’s 2025 ratings were not the ratings of a show that had already died. Nielsen Live+7 figures compiled for the year show Jimmy Kimmel Live as the only 11:35 p.m. network hour that gained in both total viewers and the 18-49 demo. The comparison with Fox News’s Gutfeld! still favors Gutfeld on raw audience, in a slot 90 minutes earlier.

WHO HELD THE LATE-NIGHT AUDIENCE IN 2025

Nielsen changed its method last year, so the year-over-year percentages sit on a shifted baseline. Even with that caveat, Kimmel was not the weakest 11:35 show, and he was not the most watched show in late night. After Colbert left in May, Kimmel’s hour picked up some of the remaining audience, which is the one argument ABC can take into an upfront conversation. It is also why a cancellation rumor moved so fast: the last remaining political target at 11:35 looks, from outside the building, like the next Colbert.

That is the wrong read of the paperwork. CBS closed a franchise. ABC is haggling over the cost of keeping one. Fallon’s Tonight Show, cheaper in the public imagination and richer in ads in recent iSpot tallies that ABC has not matched in Guideline’s Kimmel figure, still has a contract through 2028. Kimmel is on a one-year clock with a 20 percent problem.

OConnell’s Job Is Linear Profit

The executive asking for the cut is new in the chair and old at Disney. On March 16, 2026, Dana Walden named Debra OConnell chairman of Disney Entertainment Television, a new role over ABC Entertainment, Hulu Originals, Disney Branded Television, National Geographic Content, and the creative side of 20th Television. She kept ABC News and the owned stations. Craig Erwich still runs ABC Entertainment under her.

OConnell’s company bio says the job is to fuel Disney+ and Hulu while maximizing the cultural reach and profitability of linear television. That second clause is the Kimmel clause. She has P&L on the ABC broadcast network. She also has the owned stations that had to live through last September, when Nexstar and Sinclair showed they could yank the 11:35 hour off local air.

Disney is cutting elsewhere at the same time. The company told staff in April it would eliminate 1,000 jobs, with later rounds hitting Pixar and National Geographic. In August it offered voluntary early retirement to U.S. leaders from director through executive vice president in Disney Entertainment, ESPN, and corporate. Deadline reported that the television group is due for its own restructure under OConnell. A 20 percent Kimmel cut fits that project. It is not a special punishment designed for one host, and it is not a promise that the host is safe.

Disney is also in a legal fight with the FCC, which ordered renewals for ABC’s eight owned-and-operated stations years early. The company says it filed “under protest.” Last year’s suspension already made Kimmel a First Amendment symbol inside the company and a target outside it. Firing him now would land as a political act. Keeping him at full price would land as a budget act OConnell was hired not to make. The third path is the one on the table.

The Interview ABC Would Not Put on TV

The same week the budget talk leaked, Kimmel moved a Thursday interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico off ABC and onto YouTube. He said the FCC had threatened the show, the network, and affiliates, and that he was acting “out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas.” The White House said it had not threatened him and called that account a “false narrative.”

On the YouTube posting, Kimmel said they were “bypassing the public airwaves” because “they want to make our editorial decisions for us.” The clip crossed 5 million views in 24 hours. That is a real audience. It is not a replacement for the $100 million machine that still has to staff El Capitan, pay The Cletones, and fill an ABC hour that affiliates can refuse to run.

In June, Kimmel looked at Colbert’s exit and said, “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.” He also said late-night was being “poisoned,” not dying on its own. The September talks are drier than that. ABC will air Jimmy Kimmel Live through May 2027. After that, Disney wants the same host on a cheaper show, and it has not yet said what happens if the cheaper show is not on offer.