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Jimmy Kimmel pushed back Monday against reports that Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” was losing CBS $40 million a year, calling them completely false.
“I just want to say that the idea that Stephen Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical,” Kimmel told Variety in an interview published Monday. “These alleged insiders who supposedly analyze the budgets of the shows — I don’t know who they are, but I do know, they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“They seem to only be focused on advertising revenue and have completely forgotten about affiliate fees, which number in the hundreds of millions — probably in total billions — and you must allocate a certain percentage of those fees to late-night shows,” he added.
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In its July 18 statement announcing Colbert’s show would end, CBS said the decision was ‘purely’ financial and “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
Puck News reported that Colbert’s show “has been losing more than $40 million a year” for CBS and that it had a budget of “more than $100 million per season,” comparing it with CBS’ daytime and primetime programming, which were “still profitable.”
But Kimmel told Variety that there is no way Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year.
“It really is surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works,” Kimmel said.
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“There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate. Even that — that’s all you need to know,” he added. “Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year? I will tell you, the first 10 years I did the show, they claimed we weren’t making any money — and we had five times as many viewers on ABC as we do now. Who knows what’s true? All I know is they keep paying us — and that’s kind of all you need to know.”
Kimmel also said that he thinks late-night television is far from dead.
“Network television is declining,” Kimmel told Variety. “There’s no question about that. But more people are watching late-night television than ever before — and I include Johnny Carson in that. People may find that shocking. When Carson was at his peak, he was getting around 9 million viewers a night. That’s huge. Of course, the lead-in shows were getting 30 and 40 million, which was a big part of it. But people are still watching late-night — just in different places. Our monologues get between 2 and 5 million views, sometimes more, every night.”
Fox News Digital reached out to CBS’ parent company Paramount for comment.
Fox News host Greg Gutfeld is thriving in late-night. In 2025, “Gutfeld!” averaged 3.1 million viewers through July 20, compared to 1.9 million for CBS’ outgoing “The Late Show.” During that same time period, ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” averaged 1.5 million, NBC’s “The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon” averaged 1.1 million, and NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” managed 751,000.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
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