LOS ANGELES — A top Disney executive refrained from weighing in on Jimmy Kimmel’s future at ABC as his role as a late-night host for the long term remains in question.
Dana Walden, The Walt Disney Company’s president and chief creative officer, appeared Thursday at the Bloomberg Screentime summit and was asked by Bloomberg’s Lucas Shaw whether Kimmel will be hosting his late-night show “a year from now.”
“Well, I’m certainly not going to make that announcement with you here today,” Walden awkwardly responded with a grin.
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Shaw then asked why it isn’t a “no-brainer” for Disney to keep Kimmel on air, pointing to a boost in ratings and his status as a “free speech hero” following his clashes with President Donald Trump and Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendan Carr.
“The truth is, it’s a very challenging day part, late night,” Walden responded. “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.”
“Obviously, there’s a YouTube channel. Millions of people are watching On Demand, the parts of that show — that is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show. So we’re trying to make sense of the business while also honoring a deep partnership,” she continued.
“I love Jimmy. We have a great friendship,” Walden continued. “He’s close to a number of the people at Disney. And again, we’re trying to work through it and make sense of both what does Jimmy want, what’s the right thing to do and what’s right thing for our business.”
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There has been unconfirmed speculation that the current season of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” will be its last and officially bow out in 2027. It would come following a tumultuous year for Kimmel, including when Disney briefly suspended his show in September 2025 after he sparked backlash for comments he made about the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. He also clashed with the White House earlier this year after he joked that first lady Melania Trump had “a glow like an expectant widow.”
At the same event on Wednesday, comedian Conan O’Brien lamented the decline in the late-night TV landscape.
“I saw over my 17 years with NBC … I started to see, oh, this is really changing. This is really changing,” O’Brien said. “They’re asking us to be much more cost-conscious. And it was for a good reason, which is that, you know, HBO, Cinemax, these are the things [that] are coming up. There’s more networks — instead of one late night show, ‘The Tonight Show,’ there’s now ‘Tonight Show’ and there’s David Letterman’s show, then there are other shows.”
“It’s a little like Detroit and automobiles,” he added, referencing the decline in the U.S. auto industry as competition increased from Japan and Europe.
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O’Brien spent decades on late-night television between his stints on NBC and TBS before transitioning into podcasts, now hosting “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” TBS ultimately scrapped its late-night programming in 2022 following the cancellation of “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.”
Earlier this year, CBS pulled the plug on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” replacing it with Byron Allen’s syndicated comic talk show “Comics Unleashed.” “The Late Show” reportedly was losing CBS $40 million a year and had been running on a whopping $100 million budget per season.
While the viewership of “Comics Unleashed” is a fraction of the audience that Stephen Colbert had, it was reported that CBS now expects to make a $15 million profit in the same time slot due to the massive cost-cutting.
