Warner Bros. spent $70 million making a finished movie, then tried to vanish it for a tax write-off. Two and a half years later the coyote is the one collecting the check.
Coyote vs. Acme opened this weekend in roughly 3,500 theaters after a $1.7 million Thursday that put it on pace for a record Ketchup Entertainment debut. Tracking that once hovered in the high single digits climbed into the mid-teens. Critics landed it at 95-plus percent on Rotten Tomatoes before most of the country even bought a ticket. The trailer had already done 25.6 million views in a day, an indie family record. None of those numbers should exist. The studio that paid for the thing decided, in November 2023, that the cleanest path was to lock the vault, claim roughly $30 million in tax relief, and pretend the movie never happened.
It happened anyway.
I walked out of an early screening grinning like an idiot. Hybrid live-action and Looney Tunes animation has been a graveyard for lesser attempts, but Dave Green and company treat Wile E. Coyote’s endless humiliation as both slapstick engine and genuine grievance. Will Forte’s lawyer is the exact right kind of overwhelmed. John Cena’s corporate shark has teeth. The Road Runner remains gloriously mute and undefeated. The movie is funny in the bone-deep way those old shorts were funny, then it keeps finding new ways to make the joke hurt a little. You do not need the backstory to enjoy it. The backstory just makes the enjoyment feel like justice.
Spoiler-free verdict first: if you have ever laughed at an anvil, or rooted for an underdog who keeps getting flattened, buy the ticket. Theatrical is the correct delivery system. The animation pops. The gags need communal noise. Streaming can wait.
The Funeral Screening Was the Tell
Will Forte has been admirably clear about how surreal the burial felt from the inside. “They called and said, ‘Well, Warner Bros. is not going to release the movie theatrically,’” he told CBC. “‘They’re not going to stream it either. They’re just going to make it go away. They’re going to make it disappear, and they’re taking a tax write-off.’”
A week later the cast and crew got what the studio literally called a funeral screening. Forte again: “In that week, we just all logically concluded, well, it must not be very good then.… We go in and see it, and it was fantastic.” Then the line that should hang in every studio hallway: “Everybody in the room just looked around like, ‘What the heck is going on here? That’s the movie they’re not going to release?’ It felt like we were gaslit.”
That is the whole scandal in one room. Not a rough cut. Not a troubled production. A finished film the people who made it recognized as special, while the corporation that owned it decided erasure was more efficient than exhibition. Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt had already gone the same route under the post-merger Zaslav regime. Coyote was simply the one that refused to stay buried.
Fans lit the #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme campaign. Filmmakers canceled meetings. The studio, facing the rare kind of backlash that actually costs reputation, eventually let the project be shopped. Asking prices started in the $75-80 million range. Bids came in lower. In March 2025, Ketchup Entertainment closed for about $50 million, having already proven it could shepherd another Warner Looney Tunes title, The Day the Earth Blew Up, into theaters. Foreign presales clawed back nearly $20 million. Marketing spend stayed lean at roughly $10 million. The rest was pure audience hunger.
James Gunn, who produced and worked on the story, watched Green hold the center through the entire mess. “Dave was a great guy throughout the ups and downs. He was never overly bitter and negative, although a little bit of bitterness and negativity was understandable in the given circumstances.” That restraint paid off. Green’s own thank-you note on release day was pure release: the film is “proof that movies don’t just go away. We make work so it can be seen and shared — that’s the whole reason we do what we do.”
Forte drove the parallel home harder. “Just like in the movie, all these underdogs somehow were able to rise up against this massive corporation.” And later: “You guys lifted us up on your shoulders and just fought and fought for this movie. Most of you, without even having seen it.”
Most of them without even having seen it. That detail still floors me. People defended a movie on principle, on the simple idea that completed art should not be deleted for a spreadsheet. Then the movie turned out to be good enough that the principle and the product finally matched.
Acme Owns Warner Now, At Least on Screen
The film opens with a meta jab that lands like a cartoon mallet: Warner Bros. itself framed as “a wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation.” You can feel the room laugh and wince at the same time. That is the correct temperature. This is not a revenge screed. It is a Looney Tunes legal comedy that understands its own absurdity and still believes the coyote deserves his day in court.
Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece supplied the original joke. Samy Burch’s screenplay (story shared with Gunn and Jeremy Slater) turns it into a full comic engine without sanding off the melancholy that always lived under Wile E.’s endless failure. The production design treats Acme products like sacred objects of disappointment. Costume and color track the lawyer’s rising confidence against the corporation’s slick indifference. Green shoots the live-action frames so the animated coyote feels like he occupies real space and real legal jeopardy. That seam is where most hybrids die. This one thrives there.
Why does the story hit so hard right now? Because audiences have spent half a decade watching streamers and conglomerates treat finished work as disposable inventory. Write-offs became strategy. “Content” became the word that killed “movies.” Coyote vs. Acme arrived as the rare counter-example where the crowd, the cast, an indie distributor, and a genuinely funny film all refused the disappearance. Ketchup did not invent that hunger. It simply answered the phone.
The opening will not rewrite the global box-office record books. A $70-plus million movie that already sold once for $50 million does not need to. What it needs to do is prove the theatrical window still has oxygen for something weird, specific, and studio-orphaned. Early returns say yes. Families are showing up. Adults who grew up on the shorts are showing up. The people who signed petitions without a trailer are showing up to see whether the fight was worth it.
It was.
Green called the release a victory for everyone who poured years into the thing and everyone who refused to let it vanish. He is right. Persistence beat a tax strategy. A 98-to-103-minute cartoon lawsuit about defective rocket skates just became the clearest recent argument that audiences still want finished stories more than clean balance sheets.
WATCH it in a theater this weekend. Score: 8.5/10 — a sharp, generous Looney Tunes comedy that survived its own studio and earned every laugh it gets on the big screen where it belonged.
