Debra O'Connell, who runs Disney Entertainment Television, has reportedly asked Jimmy Kimmel to trim the budget on "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" as part of talks to keep him on ABC beyond the current season. Puck first reported the ask, according to TheWrap, which put the show's production cost at close to $100 million a year, roughly what CBS was spending on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" before that show got axed entirely.

The renewal conversation itself isn't new territory for either side. Kimmel signed a one-year deal in 2025 instead of his usual three-year contract, a shift that both Variety and TheWrap frame as a symptom of late-night's shrinking economics as much as anything else. Ad spending across the whole daypart fell from $519.7 million in 2017 to $209 million last year, per Guideline data cited by Variety. Kimmel's own show still pulled in $51.1 million of that in 2024, about a fifth of total late-night ad spend, though that share trails what Fallon's "Tonight Show" and Colbert's now-dead program used to command.

The politics won't stay out of the room

What makes this round harder to read as pure business is everything sitting around it. Kimmel got pulled off air for five days last September after remarks about Charlie Kirk's killing, a suspension that Nexstar and Sinclair pushed for and that free-speech groups pushed straight back against. He hasn't dialled anything down since. TheWrap notes he was still going after FCC chair Brendan Carr as recently as this week, calling out what he described as another swing at free speech.

That fight has a bigger stage behind it. Disney is currently in a legal dispute with the FCC over an order forcing ABC's owned stations to file for licence renewal years early, a move Disney has called unlawful and unconstitutional in its filings. "The View" has drawn similar heat from the administration. Kimmel putting Texas Senate candidate James Talarico on a YouTube stream, and ABC then pulling that interview over what were described as FCC concerns, only added to the sense that Disney is negotiating with one eye on Washington.

And yet Kimmel is more valuable to ABC right now than he's been in years. His ratings climbed after CBS pulled Colbert off its schedule in May, which theoretically lets the network charge more for the audience he's holding onto. So the calculus isn't simple: cut costs, keep a host whose show still generates headlines and legal headaches, and figure out whether a one-year deal again gives both sides room to bail if things get worse.

Disney declined to comment to both Variety and TheWrap. A representative for Kimmel declined to comment as well, and his agent, James Dixon, wasn't reachable. Nothing here is signed. The current deal runs through the 2026-27 season, and whatever gets decided will land before that clock runs out.