Let the “American Idol” wars begin.
Behind the scenes, the search for someone to replace lame-duck Simon Cowell next season has already started.
“Idol’s” other Simon — the show’s creator and Cowell’s one-time mentor, Simon Fuller — has budgeted a staggering $40 million to pay whoever is hired to fill Simon’s seat, according to reports.
And, it has become clear in the last few days, Fuller will not let Cowell start a new rival show, “X Factor,” with his blessing.
Fuller is now sneering at Cowell’s new show publicly.
Comparing, “X Factor” — now the most popular show in Britain — to “American Idol” is like comparing pro wrestling to boxing, Fuller said in an interview published yesterday in the Times of London.
“We’re not going to be led into the mud, we’re going to stay on our hill,” Fuller says.
The two Simons have been skirmishing off and on since 2005, when Fuller sued Cowell, claiming “X Factor” was nothing but a rip off of “Idol.”
They eventually settled the suit out of court and continued to work together, until last week when Cowell announced he was quitting “Idol” at the end of this season to start a US version of “X Factor” next year.
Both shows will air on Fox.
“Simon’s exit is going to leave a massive hole,” Piers Morgan, the “America’s Got Talent” judge, told The Post. (Cowell owns the show as well as the UK hit “Britain’s Got Talent,” which discovered Susan Boyle.)
“‘Idol’ is built around Simon calling out contestants . . . And if you remove that element from ‘Idol,’ you remove a large part of why people watch,” he says.
“You can’t just have four people being pleasant.”
Morgan believes that Fuller will have to hire another Brit for the job.
“I imagine what’s concerning Fox executives is how to find someone who can be as caustic, direct and blunt with their criticisms as Simon,” he says.
“It’s not the natural bag of most American celebrities to be that way,” says Morgan, who has been mentioned as a possible replacement. “It may be a peculiarly British thing to be like that.
“I know a lot of American celebrities feel uncomfortable being that blunt with people.”
If viewers end up preferring Cowell’s new show, Fuller says, “that’s the way it will be.”
“Idol” winners such as Kelly Clarkson, he says, “have defined the moment.”
Fuller says the “Susan Boyle phenomenon . . . is not based on anything but the bizarre.”