Jimmy Kimmel wants to stay on ABC past May, but Disney is opening renewal talks with a hard condition: cut the budget of Jimmy Kimmel Live!
After his summer break, Kimmel told Disney he wants to re-up beyond his current deal, which expires in May. Debra OConnell, the Disney Entertainment Television chair who oversees ABC, agreed to talks only if the show’s cost comes down, Puck reported Friday. The price tag is the immediate issue. JKL! costs roughly what CBS spent on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show — about $100 million a year — before CBS canceled that franchise last fall.
Late-night budgets have been under pressure industry-wide; Colbert’s fate is the closest comparison, and ABC’s ask follows the same pattern of squeezing a high-cost nightly franchise before deciding whether to keep it. The money is hard to separate from politics. Disney is suing the FCC over Chair Brendan Carr’s early review of its broadcast licenses. The commission has framed the review around DEI and other regulatory concerns; Kimmel’s staff and others around the show see Carr’s pressure as aimed more at Kimmel’s relentless Trump jokes.
Kimmel wants to stay the course. He has talked about keeping the platform through the 2028 election — and, more notably, beyond Trump. A source close to him and ABC both pushed back earlier this week on a Page Six item that said the show was finished after this season; ABC called that “purely speculative.”
Deadline separately confirmed Friday that renewal talks are underway, with budget cuts the main wrinkle. What happens next is a negotiation, not a verdict. If Kimmel accepts a leaner show, ABC can keep its late-night franchise and Kimmel can keep a national microphone into 2028. If the cuts are a pretext, the talks themselves become the off-ramp.
Either way, the next deal will be decided as much by Washington pressure and late-night economics as by ratings.