Jun 11, 2026

Welcome back to What I’m Hearing, coming to you for the next couple weeks from my secret summer lair far from Hollywood. 👋👋

Related: I’m doing a mailbag issue next Thursday, so reply with any burning questions you’d like answered in this space. (No, I don’t know why David Zaslav wears a backward baseball cap at Knicks games.)

💫💫 Emmy voting begins today! Big thanks to everyone who came to see me face off against Sean Evans at the Hot Ones F.Y.C. event on Tuesday. (A packed house, so suck it, The Pitt!) Good news: I didn’t die. Bad news: My stomach is still making weird noises. I posted some fun videos, and the full chat will run as a bonus episode of The Town this weekend.

Tonight, some exclusive data on how the late night TV audience is shifting in a post-Colbert landscape (with the help of the Knicks). Plus, a top Disney executive’s Dalai Lama trip leads to near-disaster, the Wasserman agency bidders narrow, a big franchise is up for grabs, and much more…

Discussed in this issue: Josh D’Amaro, Stephen Colbert, Casey Wasserman, George Miller, Pete Docter, Chris Licht, Taylor Swift, Jeff Zucker, Jimmy Kimmel, Steven Spielberg, Jay Leno, Robert Pattinson, Larry David, Jimmy Fallon, David S. Goyer, Martin Scorsese, Jon Stewart, Michael Eisner, Conan O’Brien, Patty Jenkins, Byron Allen, Brendan Carr, Greg Gutfeld, and… Hugh Grant’s sex worker.

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Let’s begin…

Thursday Thoughts…

Disney’s Docter–Dalai Lama drama: I’m old enough to remember Kundun, the 1997 Martin Scorsese movie about the Dalai Lama, which got Disney all but banned in China until then-C.E.O. Michael Eisner publicly apologized and called the film a “stupid mistake.” Needless to say, those sensitivities have lingered, especially during the 2010s box office boom and as Disney has expanded in the region with Shanghai Disneyland, which will celebrate its 10th anniversary next week at a gala event to be attended by C.E.O. Josh D’Amaro.

So it probably wasn’t the smartest move, as my colleague Kim Masters tipped me, for top Pixar executive Pete Docter to join a group of Hollywood people a couple weeks ago on a seemingly benign vacation to India that included a meet and greet with the exiled spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism. That’s a big no-no to China, which still considers the Dalai Lama a dangerous separatist and often punishes companies and individuals who host or meet with him. Docter, the chief creative officer of Pixar, known for directing Up, Inside Out, and its sequel, has done trips like this in the past. (He also met the pope.) And he was apparently unaware of the political sensitivities around the Dalai Lama for a company that conducts extensive business in China. So when Disney found out where he was, Docter was, uh, educated about the issue. He and his wife skipped the sitdown and came home, leaving behind the rest of the delegation, which included Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins and writer-producer David S. Goyer.

After all, Disney is about to release Pixar’s Toy Story 5 in China. One source told Kim that the Chinese distributor of that film warned Disney to expect repercussions including a canceled release if Docter went ahead with the meeting, but a Disney source strongly denied that the Chinese complained or were even aware of the trip. Regardless, the meeting didn’t happen, Docter returned home, and he and D’Amaro were all smiles chatting at the Toy Story 5 premiere on Tuesday. (Reps for Disney, Jenkins, and Goyer declined to comment.)

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Who wants to make Mad Max 6?: George Miller was just in town meeting with studios about a new Mad Max movie. The 81-year-old Australian auteur is said to have generated interest from at least Amazon, Universal, and Sony Pictures, and according to one source familiar, Miller is saying he would like to make one last Mad Max pic, then a TV series, then sell the whole property to the highest bidder. Interesting that Warner Bros. is not in the mix here. Warners has been involved in distributing all five previous Mad Max movies, but that includes 2024’s Furiosa, which grossed just $175 million worldwide, about what it cost to produce. Miller visited the Burbank lot, but WB’s film and TV divisions both passed, I’m told.
Also…: an important update on the Jeff Zucker cameo in Primetime, A24’s To Catch a Predator movie. Zucker does share screentime with star Robert Pattinson. “It’s very funny,” says a source on the project.
Wasserman bidders to pay the “Casey tax”?: Letters of intent were due this week as the sale process narrows for the sports and talent agency formerly known as Wasserman. Per multiple sources, UTA (with its private equity backer, EQT) is still in the mix, as is Excel Sports Management/Goldman Sachs, the U.K.’s Primera, and Swiss P.E. firm Partners Group. One wrinkle is founder Casey Wasserman, who along with majority owner Providence, has final say over who buys either all or part of the company. Wasserman wants to be paid a control premium, as well as extra fees to give up his ability to compete with and solicit clients and employees of his soon-to-be-former firm. One dealmaker I spoke to was grumbling over the ”Casey tax” because Wasserman, chair of the LA28 Olympics, is selling only after the noise around his correspondence with Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell sparked outrage among clients of the agency, now dubbed The Team. Regardless, this feels like it’s all part of a negotiation.
Box office over/under: Universal’s Disclosure Day tracking has ticked up this week to $39 million domestic, per NRG. I’ll take the over, and hopefully, given the Spielberg brand, this one will have legs.

Now on to movement in the late night wars…

Kimmel Is Filling the Colbert Void

Now that Stephen Colbert has exited the late night cage match, one Jimmy has been collecting the spoils. But a strong NBA lead-in and shared political leanings are giving ABC an early advantage—and could reverberate across YouTube and beyond.

Matthew Belloni

Late night TV viewers, to the extent they still exist outside of those whose Advil PM kicks in during the local news, tend to be a fickle crew. Barring big lead-in moments, like sports or debates or wars, the audiences for the remaining broadcast shows (plus The Daily Show!) are pretty steady. It often takes a defining moment to cause a shift: Letterman decamping NBC for CBS in 1993; Leno’s sex worker interrogation of Hugh Grant; Conan’s 2010 firing and the #TeamCoco movement; and, more recently, Colbert going full #Resistance after the 2016 election.

Looks like we’re passing through one of those moments right now, with the May 21 cancellation of Late Show With Stephen Colbert and the immediate cash-grab filler—sorry, fiscally responsible replacement programming—of Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed. Everyone knew the CBS audience at 11:35 would fall off a cliff, and indeed it has. In the two full weeks since assuming the 11:35 time slot, the audience for Comics Unleashed is down more than half from Late Show. That’s Allen’s problem, not CBS’s, since he’s buying out the time. But the real question is, Where is that Colbert audience going?

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At least initially, it looks like they’re going to Jimmy Kimmel. It’s super early, and skewed by several nights of strong lead-ins from sports, notably the record-setting NBA Finals—Monday’s Game 3 averaged 23.8 million viewers, per Nielsen. Last night’s historic Knicks comeback, with its Taylor Swift/Wu-Tang boost, likely generated even bigger numbers that aren’t available yet. But even before that, Kimmel had been consistently crushing Jimmy Fallon during the first two weeks of head-to-head competition between ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. And Kimmel is up compared to the same week last year, which also featured the NBA Finals, though not the Knicks and multiple Haim sisters.

Again, that chart is skewed, with the NHL Stanley Cup Final also airing on ABC, albeit with a fraction of the ratings as the NBA Finals. But even on June 1, without any sports lead-in, Kimmel beat Fallon 2.2 million viewers to 1.3 million—a wider chasm than Kimmel had enjoyed during the season to date. And a good argument can be made that these basketball and hockey audiences are sampling Kimmel at exactly the right time. For some of them, Colbert was their first choice and now they are at least Kimmel-curious. The key will be whether they stick around. Kimmel goes on summer vacation at the end of the month, replaced by eight weeks of guest hosts. Maybe some of that momentum will be lost, maybe not.

Regardless, it's all good fodder for Kimmel’s recent argument that late night isn’t actually dying, or at least that it’s dying more slowly than many in the media claim. Unlike Colbert, both Kimmel and Fallon generate especially strong YouTube numbers, as well as value for Disney and NBCUniversal beyond their own linear shows. (So far in 2026, the Jimmy Kimmel Live! page has passed half a billion views.) Maybe the consolidation of 11:35 shows from three to two will help keep those shows alive longer. If the genre can just tweak itself to work better on streaming, or hold on long enough for the economics of digital video to catch up to linear, maybe the underpinnings will continue to sustain professionally produced topical comedy beyond the end of the linear TV era.

Or not. But for now, Kimmel seems poised to inherit the rusting crown of late night leader. After all, Colbert became the champ by leaning into his leftie politics. He and his defining producer, Chris Licht, who helped launch Morning Joe on MSNBC before his disastrous run at CNN, recognized that in a post-monoculture TV landscape, there’s no such thing as Johnny Carson—so trying to be an everyman for every audience turns you into a nobody for no one. Becoming polarizing is actually a smarter strategy these days than avoiding partisanship, as Fallon often does, because you become must-watch for a certain segment of the audience, whether it’s Colbert and Kimmel on the left or Greg Gutfeld’s Fox News chat show, Gutfeld!, on the right. The downside of preaching to the choir is that everyone else either ignores you entirely or, in the case of Colbert, the president and his F.C.C. tries to run you off the air. But just assembling a large enough choir in the first place is the goal.

Kimmel is playing that same game, of course, leaning into the anti-Trump rhetoric (often hilariously so) and openly feuding with the president and F.C.C. chair Brendan Carr. Kimmel seems genuine in his politics, but it’s also a savvy audience play. Coming out of the ’23 strikes and into the ’24 election, he went from occasionally to usually beating Fallon, though still lagging Colbert. And then last fall, after the Charlie Kirk dustup and getting briefly yanked off the air by Disney/ABC, Kimmel began to post sustained ratings growth over the prior year. And now, with his position well-defined and the other polarizing anti-Trumper having been canceled for either economic or political reasons (my take has always been that it was a bit of both), Kimmel stands to benefit again. And if and when Jon Stewart ends his second tenure on The Daily Show, Kimmel could consolidate even more of the political left into one even more dominant show that rides out the sunset years of the genre.

Finally… One Fun Thing…

Thanks to the WIH reader who snapped this poetic image on Sunset Boulevard last weekend as Masters of the Universe was bombing…

See you Monday,
Matt

Correction: Gooseworx (a.k.a. Cooper Smith Goodwin), the Amazing Digital Circus showrunner, identifies as female. I mixed up a pronoun on Monday. Apologies.

Got a question, comment, complaint, or the wig budget on Larry David’s new show? Email me at Matt@puck.news or call/text me at 310-804-3198.

Puck fashion correspondent Lauren Sherman and a rotating cast of industry insiders take you deep behind the scenes of this multitrillion-dollar biz, from creative director switcheroos to M&A drama, D.T.C. downfalls, and magazine mishaps. Fashion People is an extension of Line Sheet, Lauren’s private email for Puck, where she tracks what’s happening beyond the press releases in fashion, beauty, and media. New episodes publish every Tuesday and Friday.

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