Disney Says That Conan O'Brien Can Host The Oscars Whenever He Wants
Disney Says That Conan O'Brien Can Host The Oscars Whenever He Wants
Keegan KellyWed, March 18, 2026 at 12:00 AM UTC
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The producers of Hollywood’s biggest night have seen enough, and they’re ready to hand Conan O’Brien a blank check to be the Oscars “Host for Life” until their lease is up.
On Sunday, the long-time late-night host and current podcasting kingpin expertly threaded the needle as master of ceremonies at the Academy Awards. At a time when the federal government is rapidly expanding its influence over the independent media and every major film release is a new battleground for the culture wars, Conan took no prisoners and left no crumbs while managing not to make any new enemies who didn’t already believe him to be a lizard person.
In fact, Conan’s performance was so apt and engaging that, in an Oscars postmortem interview for Variety, Rob Mills, the executive vice president of Walt Disney Television, declared that Big Red can come back and host any time he wants – until ABC loses the rights to the big show.
Reflecting on the “Host for Life” gag from the post-credits sketch at the end of ABC's Oscars broadcast, Mills said that the line wasn't a gag at all. “Oh, that is no joke, Conan is host for life, yes,” Mills insisted, adding of comedy legend, “He hasn’t even accepted yet. He’s just being told. We’re assuming that was not a comedy bit. We’re going to treat that as if that was fact.”
Speaking specifically on Conan's cold open, which gave the internet one of its most disturbingly memeable screenshots when he donned the hair and makeup of Oscar-winner Amy Madigan from her film Weapons, Mills called the video “one of the more ambitious things that we’ve done,” saying of the production, “It took a couple of days to shoot. It was a lot.”
“Sometimes these jobs are like fantasy camp and to be working with Conan is always incredible," Mills continued, “I remember those when he had special occasions, or when he hosted things like the Emmys, he would make these films, and they were great. When it was their 10th anniversary of Late Night, he did one of those ones where he ran into the streets of New York, and literally, everybody’s following him. It was sort of similar to this bit.”
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“He’s always done these films that are great,” Mills concluded of Conan's ambitious project. "And it also sort of reminded me of what Billy Crystal used to do. So it was great. It felt distinctly Conan, but also distinctly Oscar.”
So despite the undoubtedly heavy production costs associated with Conan's hosting gig, Disney will be happy to keep paying up for the privilege of being his patron – which is more than they can say for the Oscars themselves.
Critically, ABC's contract with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences only lasts for two more years, with the broadcast giant capping off their tenure as the exclusive home of the Oscars with the 100th annual ceremony. After that, as Conan teased during his final sketch of the night, YouTube will take over the Academy Awards, presumably to instate Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson as the new “Host for Life.”
Sadly, high-production-value shows like the one Conan delivered on Sunday could soon become a relic of a bygone era. It's unclear how, exactly, YouTube will change the traditions, pomp and circumstance of Oscar Night, but there will certainly be changes. And, while Team Coco has a healthy following on the platform, it feels inevitable that YouTube will push some Gen Z content creator with no connection to the film world onto the Oscars audience in an attempt to convince younger viewers with shorter attention spans to sit around watching the same show for four hours.
With his latest hosting gig, Conan made the Oscars an extravagant variety show that celebrated and mocked in equal measure. Hopefully, he'll do it two more times before it turns into the artistic equivalent of an endless scroll on YouTube Shorts.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
