By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | September 23, 2025
It’s going to go down a lot further if they cancel his show. Disney does not want to be the ones that broke America.” — Mark Ruffalo
Perhaps Mark Ruffalo really does think he has an indestructible giant lurking inside his insufferable jerk exterior. After all, not long after he posted that on Threads, Disney executives reversed course and decided to put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air.
But don’t expect Disney stock to suddenly bounce back, or subscriptions to Disney+ to surge. Mark Ruffalo is no Warren Buffett.
Yes, Disney’s stock price had gone down 3% since last Wednesday, when the Disney-owned ABC gave Kimmel the boot.
But so what?
Disney stock plunged 38% after the company decided to step into the political swamp in early 2022 and attack a Florida bill that banned schools from teaching children up to the third grade about transgenderism – a bill Disney vilified as “Don’t say gay.”
That was a move, by the way, that Ruffalo publicly praised, saying at the time that “I want to be crystal clear: I and the entire leadership team unequivocally stand in support of our LGBTQ+ employees, their families, and their communities. Bravo!”
Disney stock was down 41% from its March 2021 high and had been trading around 100 ever since. That was at least in part due to the company’s embrace of the woke agenda, which caused it to churn out a series of leftist agitprop movie and TV flops and sparked waves of Disney+ cancellations. (Worldwide subscriptions are 23% lower now than the peak in late-2022.)
In other words, the company has been in serious trouble precisely because it had been listening to the likes of Mark Ruffalo about how to run its business, while ignoring the desires of Americans who want to be entertained, not lectured.
But, the idea that firing Jimmy Kimmel would somehow break America is truly a Hulk-sized absurdity.
The only reason anyone knew anything about Jimmy Kimmel is that the liberal media would traffic his rantings to their audiences. He hasn’t been funny in decades, if he ever was. His show had been getting ratings that were lower than Keith Olbermann’s 14 years ago — on MSNBC.
The only reason ABC kept Kimmel on the air as long as they did, and the only reason Disney rehired him, has been to appease the never-satisfied leftist gods.
Nobody wins from Disney’s cowardice. Not its investors. Not viewers who — for a brief moment — saw the possibility of something better to watch on ABC. And not anyone hoping for a return to civility.
As long as Disney puts politics over entertainment, the poisoning of America’s culture will continue.
Issues & Insights was founded by seasoned journalists of the IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day – without fear or favor.
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