Deadline executive editor Dominic Patten said that he's hearing Disney may back down after public backlash over the yanking of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel.
Speaking to MSNBC on Thursday, nearly 24 hours after the news broke, Patten said, "There is some hope that they can find a pathway back," speaking about ABC's parent company Disney.
"Jimmy Kimmel is still hosting 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?'" he said. "But it's going to be a hard road because we've seen the repercussions of this. There are protests happening outside the Disney offices in Burbank. There are protests happening on Hollywood Boulevard. Are they massive? No, but they're there. People are canceling their Disney+ subscriptions."
The "fact of the matter is there's always been a tendency in American life — we saw it with the Smothers Brothers in the '60s. We saw with Bill Maher in 2002, who got canceled because he said that he would not accept calling the 9/11 terrorists cowards," Patten continued.
"He called them terrorists, but not cowards. That was how Jimmy Kimmel got his show in 2003, because of that. Irony of ironies, unfortunately."
He went on to say that this comes after President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Wednesday night, warning that Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers were next.
"And you don't think that that's going to land somewhere with people? We saw this in the '80s. You remember [Jerry] Falwell used to talk about wanting to buy CBS so he could fire Dan Rather? That is, this is a conservative instinct that has been there," Patten added.
