Sean Evans, co-creator of Hot Ones, described to Forbes the arithmetic of a press tour through a single set. When Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman promote a film, their stop at the hot wings set, he says, beats most of what they shoot in a day. He summed it up in the interview: “how is their appearance on Hot Ones going to match up to other shows that they’ve been on? Chances are like the biggest splash, the deepest cultural penetration that they’re going to get with a single press stop is going to be them eating the wings of death”.
Late-night loses advertising to YouTube
Advertising spend in US late-night fell from $439 million in 2018 to $220.6 million in 2024, roughly half, according to data from Guideline reported by Adweek.
At the same time, the audience for shows created online is growing. Jimmy Kimmel Live! averaged 1.85 million linear viewers in the third quarter of 2025. Hot Ones averaged 2.6 million views per episode this year, The Wrap reports, adding that the metrics are different. The show filmed at the hot wings table is thus being measured against a network late-night show.
What publicists are buying at Hot Ones
Hot Ones has accumulated more than 5.8 billion views and 3,000 videos, Forbes reports, citing the First We Feast channel. Evans attributes the show’s power to what emerges from discomfort at the table. A guest’s reaction to the hot sauce, he says, becomes “a gift that has sort of second life in the meme economy of the internet”. A grimace or a quick gulp of milk is cut together, and people keep watching it long after a segment from a talk show would have been forgotten.
Evans frames this commercially too, for Forbes. “Yes, there’s a price you’re going to have to pay. You’re going to have to eat these scorching hot chicken wings. But this isn’t going to be a press stop that you do and no one sees it,” he said. “Whatever suffering you go through will not be in vain.” That guarantee is exactly what the fifteenth stop on a traditional press tour can no longer offer.
Pressure that has nothing to do with the star’s career also shapes the guest lineup. “A lot of times when we get big guests, the thing that’s motivating them to come in will be like, ‘My kids have been begging me to be on the show,’” Evans told Forbes. The children’s plea has become part of the offer that a publicist brings to a talent.
Evans described a deeper reason on the guest’s side for Forbes. The format “takes the idea of celebrity, people on a pedestal, a lifestyle that by definition is unobtainable and then it knocks them down to a level that we all understand, which is dying on hot sauce”. That vulnerability turns a promotional obligation into something that seems credible.
The interview as the oldest media format
Evans does not treat the show’s appeal as a mere novelty. “The interview is the oldest construct in the history of media,” he told Forbes, citing Howard Stern, David Letterman and Conan O’Brien, whom he grew up watching. He describes what he built as “a classic foundation, but then a new build on the house above it”.
There is also a practical reason why creator shows are easier to cast. They are recorded in advance, so agents and managers have more control over which clips air, and a nervous guest does not have to handle a live broadcast. They also reach a younger audience that linear television does not.
Evans does not claim the strategy as his own. “Not that we’re so prescient. These are things that we figured out along the way, not things that we planned for,” he told Forbes.
The same formats are growing in Europe
The same shift is visible in European formats. The British series Chicken Shop Date, in which Amelia Dimoldenberg interviews celebrities over fried chicken, had around 1,000 views for its first episode in 2014. Today it is a regular stop on the tours of top-tier stars, with guests including Jennifer Lawrence, Bella Hadid and Sabrina Carpenter, Forbes reports.
In France, Konbini is revamping its video interviews. According to The Media Leader, the Fast & Curious format returns in 2026 with guests such as Malik Bentalha and Pierre Niney, and the Vidéo Club format will return to the Cannes festival before Konbini takes it to the United States.
Where the press tour has moved
Late-night is not over. Evans, who describes himself as a “Letterman guy”, wants to build something bigger one day and points to the tradition of aspirational talk shows. “There’s a part of me that feels this responsibility to try to continue the tradition of aspirational talk shows in some way,” he told Forbes.
The order of stops on a press tour has shifted so far that a publicist now has to consider which stop will actually spread on the internet when promoting a film. The answer is often a plate of hot wings or a fried chicken.
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