‘Not A Snowball’s Chance in Hell’ Colbert Loses $40 Million A Year, According to Jimmy Kimmel

Sure, CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but it had nothing to do with pressure from the current administration, network executives claimed. Instead, CBS and parent Paramount Global say they booted Colbert to the curb because the show was losing 40 million bucks a year. 

One comedian who’s calling BS on that claim? Colbert’s ABC rival Jimmy Kimmel, who told Variety, “that the idea that Stephen Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical.” While the comedian doesn’t have access to the studio’s books, “there’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate.”

Kimmel explained there are two reasons he doesn’t buy the $40 million claim. First, he said it’s “surprising how little the media seems to know about how the media works.” Alleged insiders who are running the numbers are only focusing on advertising revenues, he says, completely ignoring 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.”

The second reason: Studios lie. “I will tell you,” he said, “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?”

There’s a reason people talk about “Hollywood accounting,” that mysterious method of calculating profits (or lack thereof) to avoid paying a percentage to the people who make the movies. For example, Forrest Gump author Winston Groome was contracted to receive three percent of net profits, but Warner Bros. claimed that the movie, which made $678 million worldwide on a budget of $55 million, somehow ended up $62 million in the red. Groome got nada.

But however you run the numbers, there’s no denying late-night talk show revenues are down, way down, and likely never returning to their previous levels. The $15 million a year contracts handed out to Kimmel, Colbert and Jimmy Fallon reflect a time when the shows were money-making machines.

In summary: The decision to fire Colbert was almost certainly not solely based on money, but real financial losses gave CBS an easy way out.

Still, Kimmel argued that late night isn’t dying, despite dwindling ad dollars. “More people are watching late-night television than ever before — and I include Johnny Carson in that,” he maintained, citing the late-night talk shows’ millions of views on YouTube and social media in addition to the traditional TV watchers. 

“The advertising model may be dying, but late-night television is the opposite,” he continued. Add up the streaming numbers, and Kimmel argued that late night gets more viewers than just about anything on Netflix or Hulu.

“Yet in the media, you’d think this is a rotting corpse — which it most certainly is not,” Kimmel concluded. “It just doesn’t add up. It’s a great storyline for the press, but it’s simply not true.”