ABC's longest-running late-night host is heading for the exit after more than two decades on the air, and the network's denial hasn't quieted insiders who say the decision is already made.
Jimmy Kimmel's upcoming season of Jimmy Kimmel Live! will be his last, a source familiar with the situation told Page Six. The new season begins this week. If the timeline holds, the show will wrap in May 2027, closing out a 24-year run that began in 2003.
"His contract is not getting extended," the source said. Kimmel has signed year-to-year deals, unusual in the television business, and the latest one will apparently be the last.
ABC Entertainment pushed back hard. A spokesperson called the report flat-out wrong:
"This information is inaccurate, any reports about the future of the show at this point are purely speculative."
The denial leaves open a gap between what the network says publicly and what its own insiders are telling reporters. Kimmel himself has not confirmed or denied the report.
The reported end of Kimmel's show lands in the middle of a broader restructuring at Disney, ABC's parent company. Josh D'Amaro, Disney's new boss, has been offering veteran executives early retirement packages as part of a company-wide cost-cutting push. Late-night television, with its large staffs and shrinking audiences, is an obvious target.
CBS already pulled the plug on Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May, leaving the broadcast late-night landscape thinner than it has been in decades. Kimmel's departure would continue that trend.
Sources told Page Six the decision is unlikely to be connected to Kimmel's well-documented clashes with the Trump administration. One ABC source was blunt: "it wouldn't have anything to do with Trump." A TV insider described D'Amaro in similar terms, saying, "He's not afraid of the administration... Josh isn't folding."
That framing is worth examining against the record.
Whatever Disney's internal reasoning, Kimmel spent much of the past year testing the limits of what a network host can say about a sitting president and his family. He quipped that First Lady Melania Trump "had a glow like an expectant widow", a remark that landed days before a third assassination attempt on President Trump. The president responded by calling for ABC to fire Kimmel.
That was not Kimmel's first brush with consequences. In September 2025, he made on-air remarks about the assassination of conservative figure Charlie Kirk. Disney CEO Bob Iger temporarily pulled Kimmel off the air in the aftermath. The precise nature and duration of that removal remain unclear, but the fact that it happened at all was a stark signal: even a host with a 22-year tenure was not untouchable.
And the friction extended beyond Kimmel personally. ABC and Disney filed a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission, accusing the agency of attacking the network's free speech by requesting a review of ABC's broadcasting licenses earlier than the normal schedule. That suit landed the day after Rosie O'Donnell, a longtime antagonist of President Trump, made her debut as a guest host on Kimmel's show.
O'Donnell completed a four-night guest-hosting stint on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that one source described as a "ratings success." She went viral for performing a parody of the traditional Irish song "Danny Boy," rewritten as "Donnie Boy" to mock President Trump. A source said O'Donnell was "in her element."
The timing raises an obvious question. If Disney's leadership is genuinely unconcerned about political blowback, booking one of the president's most prominent critics as a fill-in host, while simultaneously suing the FCC over a license review, is a strange way to show it. The network can insist the show's end is a business decision. But the business and the politics have been tangled together for months.
Kimmel had previously offered hints about his own future. Page Six reported in June that he shed light on his late-night exit plans after Colbert's show ended, and later that month the outlet reported he had tapped O'Donnell to step in as he pulled back from the show.
If Kimmel's final season plays out as reported, broadcast television will have lost two of its three remaining legacy late-night franchises in the span of a year. The genre that once defined network television, and generated enormous advertising revenue, has been contracting for years under pressure from streaming, podcasts, and audiences that no longer organize their evenings around a TV schedule.
Cost-cutting under D'Amaro gives Disney a clean, apolitical explanation. And it may even be the primary one. But Kimmel did not lose his show in a vacuum. He spent years using his platform to deliver partisan attacks on the president, the First Lady, and conservative public figures, and the network absorbed real consequences for it, from presidential criticism to an FCC license review to a federal lawsuit.
ABC says the report is speculative. Its own insiders say otherwise. Either way, the era of broadcast late night as a political weapon is winding down, and the hosts who wielded it most aggressively are the ones heading for the door first.
