If ABC keeps season 22 of The Bachelorette on the shelf for good, the network will eat a loss of $30 million or more.
ABC pulled the show, which had been scheduled to premiere Sunday, from the air on Thursday. The decision came after video surfaced of a 2023 domestic violence incident between Bachelorette lead (and Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star) Taylor Frankie Paul and ex-boyfriend Dakota Mortensen. “In light of the newly released video just surfaced today, we have made the decision to not move forward with the new season of The Bachelorette at this time, and our focus is on supporting the family,” Disney Entertainment Television said in a statement.
The Bachelorette costs about $2 million per episode to produce, which depending on its episode count, would likely put this season’s budget in the $20 million-$25 million range (ABC had not released an episode count for Paul’s season prior to scrapping the show). Regardless of whether the season ever airs, ABC is on the hook for a license fee to Warner Horizon, which produces The Bachelorette and other shows in the franchise.
Marketing costs would add several million more dollars to the season’s budget, putting the total somewhere around $30 million. ABC will also take an ad sales hit: Based on industry sources, a 30-second commercial on The Bachelorette costs about $100,000. With a half hour of ads per two-hour episode, that amounts to several million dollars in revenue per show.
ABC will, of course, still sell ads against whatever programming fills The Bachelorette’s spot on Sundays (for this week, it’s an American Idol rerun), but at much lower rates. The network will also likely have to pay make-goods to advertisers that bought time on the now-scrapped season.
There’s also a big if surrounding the sunk costs: ABC and Disney could, at some point, decide to air this season of The Bachelorette. If that happens, the network might not recoup all of its costs, but the red numbers would be considerably smaller.
It’s also worth noting that for ABC and its parent company, $30 million or so is relative pocket change. Disney’s entertainment division, which includes ABC, had $11.6 billion in revenue and an operating income of $1.1 billion in the final quarter of 2025.
