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Jimmy Kimmel stood up in support of his colleague Stephen Colbert as rumours around his The Late Show continue to swirl.
Nine Primetime Emmy Award winner announced the cancellation of his talk show Thursday, July 17.
Now there has been chatter that the show got cancelled because it was ‘losing $40 million a year’.
The 57-year-old jumped in to Colbert’s defence and refuted any such claims.
Kimmel in a statement to Variety Monday, August 18 called such rumours ‘beyond nonsensical’.
“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,” he continued.
“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.”
Calling these claims as nowhere ‘near accurate’, he recalled similar controversy that he experienced.
“Even that — that’s all you need to know. Suddenly he’s losing $40 million a year?” Kimmel added. “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.”
