Stephen Colbert said on Thursday’s Late Show that internet rumors about his next move have been running wild, then answered them with a joke: next year, he will be president of an animal sanctuary devoted to caring for the rare Blitzer wolf. With only weeks left on his CBS contract, the host used the final stretch of the show to swat away speculation that he was heading to, launching a wildlife rescue program or even running for U.S. president.
“As we get close to the end, a lot of people are asking me, ‘What’s next for Stephen T. Colbert?’” he said, before adding that “all of those are partially true.” He then showed a mocked-up image of himself bottle-feeding anchor Wolf Blitzer and said the sanctuary would be “a captive breeding program. Nobody tell him.”
The jokes landed in a week when Colbert has been trying to turn a real career transition into late-night theater. CBS canceled The Late Show last summer, and Colbert has already announced that his next announced project is a film in the Lord of the Rings franchise, tentatively subtitled Shadow of the Past. Last month, he said the movie would be based on six chapters from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring that were not included in Peter Jackson’s adaptation, and that he would write it with his son, Peter McGee, and Philippa Boyens, who co-wrote the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies.
That is the part of the story that makes the late-night routine more than a farewell bit. Colbert said he could not do the film and The Late Show at the same time, and he repeated on Thursday that he will be free starting this summer. The punch line about animal sanctuaries and a faux network procedural called Uncle Cops, costarring John C. Reilly and described as “the gripping tale of two detectives who are also uncles,” was a way of saying the same thing: the show is ending, and he is already moving on.
For CBS, the end of The Late Show marked a bigger late-night shift that has already been playing out across the schedule, and for viewers the real question is no longer whether Colbert is leaving but what he does with the time he says he will soon have. He has made the answer plain. The next chapter is not another rumor. It is a film, and it starts this summer.
