Jeopardy! fans will get a Ken Jennings bonus this summer. After Jeopardy! goes off for the season at the end of July, the beloved host will be on a rival game show — Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? — with Matt Damon.
Jimmy Kimmel is back to host Season 4 of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? but this time it is all celebrities competing in pairs for charity. The new season kicks off on Wednesday, July, 23 at 8pm.
Along with Jennings and Damon, this season’s contestants include sportscaster Joe Buck and actor Oliver Hudson, Helen Hunt and Scandal‘s Dan Bucatinsky, Kal Penn and Jameela Jamil, E! red carpet reporter Brad Goreski and producer Gary Janetti, comedian Mike Birbiglia and actress Atsuko Okatsuka, Dietland‘s Tramell Tillman and actor Zach Cherry, Sarah Silverman and comedian and podcaster Marc Maron, Jordan Klepper and comedian Ronny Chieng, Jillian Bell and Chloe Fineman, Community alums Joel McHale and Jim Rash, Workaholics stars Adam Devine and Anders Holm, The Office alums Kate Flannery and Oscar Nuñez, Whose Line Is It Anyway? alums Drew Carey and Aisha Tyler, Deli Boys stars Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh, and CNN’s Jake Tapper and Kaitlan Collins.
In a preview for the game show, Ken Jennings is seen saying, “Do we love Matt Damon or what?”
“I’m coming on Jeopardy! with someone you hate,” Kimmel joked. Jennings shrugged as Damon sat in silence with his hand resting on his chin. The two have famously “feuded” for two decades. At the end of his talk show in 2005, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Kimmel said, “Apologies to Matt Damon, but we ran out of time,” but Damon was never scheduled to appear on the show. This has become a running gag and the two have pretended to hate each other ever since.
So with Jennings competing on a new game show, could he also become champion of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? One thing;’s for certain, he’s not likely to beat his Jeopardy! winnings, which stand at $4,370,700, as details on the Leaderboard of Legends.
Reddit users noticed the preview during the NBA finals and wondered why he was partnered with Damon. “Personally I would have gotten a bigger kick out of it if it had been Ken and Brad [Rutter] or Ken and James [Holzhauer], but I’m looking forward to this,” the original poster said. “I believe Ken was last on Millionaire as a non-celeb contestant about a decade ago and tapped out on the $250,000 question.” H won $100,000 in 2014.
“Saw this during the game and you beat me to the post! This is interesting to me. Millionaire and Jeopardy! have some overlap, including previous Ken appearances. It seems like we’re finally seeing Ken enter popular culture as THE host of Jeopardy! between this and Happy Gilmore,” another said. Jennings is slated to appear in Happy Gilmore 2, releasing on July 25.
However, a lot of Reddit users said that Matt Damon is “no dummy” and is “wicked smart,” so it will be interesting to see how he competes with the Greatest of All Time.
“This strikes me as a prime opportunity to promote Jeopardy!’s new Hulu deal,” one fan said. Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune recently struck streaming deals with Hulu and Peacock.
The celebrity version has only given out the $1 million prize twice — celebrity chef David Chang earned the prize for the Southern Smoke Foundation in 2020. Last season, father-son duo Ike and Alan Barinholtz also won $1 million for the ASL Program at Los Encinos School. Ike also won Season 1 of Celebrity Jeopardy!. Will Jennings be the third? His exact episode date is not yet known.
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Season 4, Wednesdays, starting July 23, 8/7c, ABC