Disney President Dana Walden declined to confirm Jimmy Kimmel Live will continue on ABC, calling late night a “very challenging daypart” amid shrinking audiences and hard business math.
Asked Thursday whether the longtime ABC late-night host would keep his show, Walden would not commit. “I’m not going to make that announcement here with you today,” she told Bloomberg, according to Breitbart News.
She framed the hesitation as industry reality, not a personal slight. Late-night broadcast television has lost viewers. Online clips do not pay like traditional ads. And Disney still has to decide what makes sense for the company and for Kimmel.
“The truth is, it’s a very challenging daypart,” Walden said. She added that Kimmel is “doing a phenomenal job” and that “his ratings are up,” but stressed those gains sit “relative to a smaller audience that’s watching late night on broadcast television.”
Fox News reported the same exchange, with Walden underscoring that a strong digital presence “is not a lucrative opportunity for a very premium talk show.” The money still lives in the linear broadcast ads that fewer people are watching.
“We’re trying to make sense of the business while also honoring a deep partnership,” she said. She called Kimmel a friend who is “close to a number of the people at Disney,” then returned to the ledger: “We’re trying to work through it and make sense of, what does Jimmy want, what’s the right thing to do, and what’s the right thing for our business.”
That hedging lands on a short leash. Kimmel is on a one-year contract. He signed the extension in December 2025 so Jimmy Kimmel Live! could run through the 2026-27 season. A New York Post account put the contract end in May 2027 and noted Walden would not say he is coming back after that date.
Last month, Page Six reported the show would “end in 2027 after 24 years on air” because the contract would not be renewed. ABC pushed back hard, telling Page Six that “any reports about the future of the show at this point are purely speculative.”
The uncertainty did not arrive overnight. Earlier this year, ABC ordered major budget cuts. Musical performances dropped to two per week from one per broadcast, a 60 percent reduction.
Before that, the show was briefly pulled after Kimmel’s remarks about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA founder. Days later, Disney and ABC put Jimmy Kimmel Live! back on the air.
National Review described the sequence in sharper terms: ABC suspended production “to avoid further inflaming a tense situation,” then reversed course after talks with Kimmel. President Trump posted on Truth Social that the “ratings challenged” show was “CANCELLED” and congratulated ABC. Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns dozens of ABC affiliates, said it would preempt the program and air news instead.
Disney’s quick reversal after the suspension left the business questions untouched. The audience for broadcast late night kept shrinking. The ad model kept eroding. The one-year deal bought time, not certainty, a pattern familiar to anyone watching how media fights and political pressure collide in the Trump era, including coverage of how Kimmel’s own political conversations keep looping back into the news cycle.
Kimmel has spent years as one of television’s most reliable critics of conservatives and of Trump. That brand built loyalty on the left and fatigue everywhere else. It also collided with a market that no longer rewards the old late-night machine the way it once did.
Walden’s answers stayed polite and noncommittal. Praise for the host. Friendship talk. Then the same refrain: smaller audience, weak online economics, partnership on one side of the scale and “the right thing for our business” on the other.
That is not a vote of confidence. It is a holding pattern. Disney already cut the show’s music budget. It already suspended the program and brought it back. It already limited Kimmel to a short extension instead of a long one. Now its president will not say the show survives past the current deal.
Viewers have watched this host use the desk for partisan shots, including bits that targeted Trump world directly. Corporations get to weigh whether that product still clears the bar when the audience for the whole time slot is contracting.
None of Walden’s comments promised cancellation. None promised renewal. She left the decision in the future tense and tied it to what Kimmel wants and what Disney’s books will bear.
Late-night television once minted cultural power and easy ad revenue. The power part still attracts political combatants. The revenue part is the problem Disney’s president would not paper over.
Other fights in Washington and the culture run on the same tension between message and consequence, whether the subject is personnel pressure around Trump’s negotiating team or bigger institutional clashes over executive authority.
For ABC, the next hard date is already on the calendar. The contract runs through the 2026-27 season. Walden declined to preview what comes after. She said the daypart is “very challenging,” the digital upside is not lucrative enough, and the company is still trying to “make sense of the business.”
That is the clearest answer Disney was willing to give, and it was not clear at all.
When a network president praises the host, cites friendship, then refuses to say the show will be back, audiences can read the balance sheet for themselves.