When Disney-owned ABC put Jimmy Kimmel Live on indefinite suspension, the broadcaster’s logic was easy to understand: Kimmel’s joke — a riff on the way Donald Trump started talking about construction on the White House’s new ballroom after being asked how he felt about Charlie Kirk being shot — was mild. But the bit prompted Trump-appointed Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr to threaten pulling the broadcast licenses of any stations that continued to air Kimmel’s late-night show.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said in an interview with right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Within hours of Carr’s threat, Nexstar Media Group — the country’s largest TV station owner — announced that its ABC affiliates would indefinitely preempt Jimmy Kimmel Live. Nexstar’s move read clearly as an attempt at currying favor with Carr’s FCC, whose approval will be required in order for Nexstar’s $6.2 billion merger with fellow broadcaster Tegna to go through. And soon after, ABC endorsed Nexstar’s decision to capitulate to Trump by suspending Kimmel’s program for the foreseeable future.
Disney is not the first entertainment megacorporation to kneel before Trump out of fear of retaliation by an administration that has been open about its desire to harm institutions it doesn’t like. This is the same kind of thinking that seemed to motivate the newly merged Paramount Skydance Corporation’s cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert after its host joked about Paramount Global settling — rather than fighting — a Trump lawsuit against CBS.
Unlike Paramount and Skydance, which were in similar need of FCC approval for a massive acquisition earlier this year, Disney’s recent show of obsequiousness comes across as a preemptive play to stay out of the Trump administration’s crosshairs. But now that the House of Mouse has shown its belly in service of what is essentially government censorship, consumers have begun calling for a boycott of its properties, and Disney’s heads have no one to blame but themselves.
It’s impossible to know if and how many people might actually stop purchasing Disney’s products because of the Kimmel situation. But in the days since the show’s suspension, the internet has become flooded with people announcing their plans to cancel their Disney Plus subscriptions and their trips to the company’s theme parks. Of course, it is easy for consumers to get online and say that they will do something, and Disney may be banking on its customers not following through.
But according to Deadline, internal tensions have been high at Disney in the days since because some of the company’s employees feel as if CEO Bob Iger and TV head Dana Walden made the wrong call. Per The Hollywood Reporter, Kimmel’s suspension came after talks between Disney executives and the comedian about whether he planned to address his joke in a way that “would take down the temperature.” Kimmel reportedly refused to “kowtow” to the pressure, which led to Walden calling him up to say that he would not be hosting this week.
Regardless of how Iger and Walden actually feel about Trump and Carr’s overt bullying, the Disney executives’ decision to pull Kimmel’s show has explicitly marked Disney as a company that’s willing to stifle free speech. Disney found itself in a similar situation with conservatives in 2023 when then-CEO Bob Chapek dithered in response to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which led to employee walkouts. This time around, many of Disney’s employees have reportedly been more reluctant to voice their concerns in fear of retaliation. But the consequences of the chilling effect that’s now plaguing Disney internally is beginning to spread out into the open.
On Thursday, She-Hulk: Attorney at Law star Tatiana Maslany encouraged her Instagram followers to cancel their Disney Plus, Hulu, and ESPN subscriptions. Soon after, writer / director Damon Lindelof posted a statement of his own saying that he would not work with Disney until Kimmel is reinstated. Former Disney CEO Michael Eisner called his successors out for not standing up for Kimmel’s right to free speech. Over the weekend, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said that Disney’s partners, employees, and customers need to consider taking “collective action to push back” against the company for caving to the Trump administration’s threats of extortion. And hundreds of other entertainers have signed an open letter from the ACLU condemning Disney for helping to usher in “a modern McCarthy era.”
Disney might be willing to accept all of this as the price of doing business, but in doing so, the company is setting a precedent that is already scaring other creatives away from working with it. According to Status, entertainment executives and agents from across the industry have been in a state of alarm — not just about whether individuals are willing to sell their projects to Disney, but about how the company’s decisions have sent a clear signal about how the Trump administration can spook one of the world’s biggest corporations into craven submission.
Why would any self-respecting writer, director, or actor want to work with Disney now that they have seen how Iger and his fellow executives might censor them if Trump does not like what they say? What’s more, Disney has no guarantee that this is the end of Trump trying to pick fights. And now that Iger has given in to the president, there is little stopping him from trying to attack the company again.
Regardless of whether Kimmel ever makes it back on air, Disney has shown the public that when push comes to shove, it is only but so willing to stand up for itself in the face of obvious authoritarianism. And even if people don’t start leaving Disney Plus in droves, and the Magic Kingdom remains a popular vacation destination, Disney has cemented this cowardice as part of its corporate legacy.
This situation has put an indelible stain on the entire Disney brand that will make everything the company produces going forward feel more like self-censored content than honest art. By kissing Trump’s ring, Iger and co. have made it impossible to know whether Disney’s movies, shows, theme parks, and toys are just pieces of entertainment or reflections of government-approved ideas that the Trump administration wants the public to internalize.
This is a terrible look for any (supposedly) powerful megacorporation, but especially one that has made billions telling stories about the importance of standing up to tyranny. And if Disney continues to move this way — only releasing art that’s deemed acceptable by an authoritarian regime — then it needs to get comfortable with people seeing it as part of Trump’s propaganda machine.
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