ABC's reportedly looking to drastically cut Kimmel's budget

This is per a new report from Puck, which quotes sources saying Kimmel has been asked to cut something like 20 percent of his operating budget as he negotiates for another year on ABC. (He’s currently working from single-year extensions on his contract with the network, after a long stint of working on three-year renewals.) The negotiations come both as speculation pops up that Kimmel’s show might be in trouble, and as he’s drawn a new spark of attention for his ongoing fights with the FCC, posting an interview with Texas’ James Talarico to YouTube this week to avoid accusations of violating the FCC’s equal-time rule for broadcast TV.

All of which is set to collide into the very tricky PR situation Disney now finds itself in: Kimmel has become, in many ways, both the face of the network and of Hollywood efforts to resist Trump’s encroachment, so anything that looks like he’s being canceled is going to be disastrous for ABC’s image. (The company caught a lot of flack for pulling Kimmel off the air in the wake of the death of Charlie Kirk last September.) And while it’s gone back and forth on that stuff, current Disney leadership has made at least some efforts to push back on Trump and Carr’s bullying, launching a legal attack on demands that it file early renewals for its various broadcast networks’ FCC licenses. At the same time, the company has, under new CEO Josh D’Amaro, been taking a buzzsaw to budgets, including gutting its health plan for employees; it’s clear Disney and ABC kind of like the clout they get from having Kimmel bloody Trump’s nose on the regular—but not necessarily enough to keep him on the air at a supposed multi-million dollar loss.