Jimmy Kimmel Reveals the Brutal Reason Nobody Can Boycott CBS for Axing Colbert During All-Star Late-Night Send Off

Jimmy Kimmel torched CBS parent company Paramount from the network’s own stage on Monday night as he offered a brutal take on why Stephen Colbert fans couldn’t boycott the company’s streaming service, like his audience did Disney’s – because no one subscribes.

As Colbert prepares to sign off from The Late Show for the very last time next week, America’s biggest late-night hosts, all from rival networks, used a rare on-air reunion to needle President Donald Trump’s long-running fixation with them and trash Paramount.

Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver joined Colbert for a farewell episode ahead of the CBS show’s finale when the conversation quickly turned from nostalgia to politics.

After making a passionate case for late-night as a genre, arguing that “people like it” and that ratings are higher than ever, Kimmel mentioned how his viewers applied pressure to Disney, the owners of ABC, after the network temporarily suspended him in 2025 following outrage over a joke he made about assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

“When I got knocked off the air for a few days, people cancelled Disney+,” he said.

Turning to Colbert’s in-studio audience, he jabbed, “Why aren’t you people canceling Paramount+? … Because you didn’t have it in the first place!”

Oliver, whose show airs on HBO, a property which Paramount may take control of in a further merger with Warner Brothers Discovery, mockingly hedged, “Well, Jimmy, until the deal goes through, if I could just do a counter there, Paramount+ might have some good programming, unless it’s not going through, which case it can go f*ck itself now and forever.”

“Reasonable people can disagree on the utility of Paramount+, right, Stephen?” he joked.

“100%,” Colbert laughed.

Colbert asked the panel whether, as young comedians, they ever imagined they would one day hold “a job that the President of the United States would have strong feelings about?”

“You know what’s even weirder?” Kimmel replied. “Doing a job that his wife has strong feelings about.”

The ABC host was referring to his recent clash with First Lady Melania Trump, prompting Meyers to joke, “Most of us have avoided that part.”

Oliver said he first learned of the fallout through the group’s private text chain.

“It’s an amazing thing to get, in a group text, a text from Jimmy saying, ‘Oh, boy.’ And then a picture of Melania mad at him,” he said.

Meyers also mocked Trump’s habit of posting on Truth Social during broadcasts.

“The thing I like, he posts when the show airs, and I want to say I appreciate that he is watching linear television,” he said. “If I would make my case for late-night, it’s that leaders of the free world are watching it when it airs.”

CBS announced the cancelation of The Late Show last year, officially calling it a financial decision, although the move came after Colbert criticized the network’s settlement with Trump, which itself came while Paramount’s merger talks with Skydance were pending federal approval.

Watch above via CBS.

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