Are Subscription Cancellations Really the Reason Jimmy Kimmel Is Back?
In the days after Jimmy Kimmel was taken off air by ABC — following threats from the FCC and the two largest American broadcast conglomerates preempting him — thousands of people canceled their subscriptions to Hulu and Disney+. It was part of a larger outcry against the clearly politically motivated removal of the talk show host. As the head of ABC’s parent company, Disney CEO Bob Iger was lambasted for bowing to the Trump administration’s attempt to silent the president’s critics.
As unlikely as it was, even people like noted Trump doormat and Republican Senator Ted Cruz spoke out against Federal Communication Commission Chair Brendan Carr playing government mob boss. Other right-wingers and conservative-friendly voices like Ben Shapiro and Bill Maher also expressed concern about the censorship from Trump, citing the sanctity of the First Amendment.
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Just hours before it was announced that Kimmel would return to air, 400 big-name celebrities, including Tom Hanks and Jennifer Aniston signed a letter with the American Civil Liberties Union condemning the cancellation. The letter also included stars currently signed on to Disney-backed projects, including Regina King, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jean Smart and Noah Wyle. Other major figures canceled on Disney or ABC-hosted events, including Jewel and New York City Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani.
But beyond the celebrity guests, there were also thousands of regular people engaging in a sudden and rapid boycott of Disney’s two streaming platforms: Hulu and Disney+. According to Google Trends, there was a massive spike in the search term “cancel disney plus” in the days after Kimmel’s removal on Wednesday, with those searches hitting a peak on September 20th, one day before Kimmel’s return was announced.
Still, because Disney will never share subscriber numbers, we don’t know how many people actually canceled Hulu and Disney+. But we do know that Disney stock plummeted. Taking Jimmy Kimmel Live! off air caused Disney’s stock valuation to tumble by $5 billion in a single week, according to the Economic Times. And based on reporting from Disney-centric blog Inside the Magic, so many people were trying to cancel their Disney accounts at the same time that the sites crashed.
Disney’s massive stock swan dive, however, can’t be singled out to the rousing boycott efforts from subscribers; Deadline reports that there was an abundance of internal dissent at Disney after Kimmel was removed on September 15th. The celebrity solidarity in the threats to boycott, especially from talent that’s attached to major Disney projects, also pushed the needle. This mounting instability likely all played a factor in Disney’s stock dip.
Losing billions in such a short period of time, even for a company like Disney, certainly sent a message to Iger. And while I struggle to believe that any CEO is motivated by moral integrity, I do believe most could be swayed by threats to profit. We might never know how instrumental the subscriber cancellations were in bringing Jimmy Kimmel Live! back. But at the very least, it demonstrated that there are still some things the American public won’t stand for.
