THE STORY – After Acme products fail him one too many times in his dogged pursuit of the Roadrunner, Wile E. Coyote decides to hire a billboard lawyer to sue the Acme Corporation.
THE CAST – Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzmán, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne & John Cena
THE TEAM – Dave Green (Director) & Samy Burch (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 103 Minutes
Few films arrive in theaters with a backstory as publicly full of twists and turns as Dave Green’s “Coyote vs. Acme”. Development on a Looney Tunes project centered around Wile E. Coyote began in 2018, and after some personnel changes, the project was finally announced in 2020 as inspired by the fictional 1990 Ian Frazier New Yorker article that ended up giving the film its name. With a screenplay by Samy Burch (not yet Oscar-nominated for her “May December“screenplay), based on a story credited to Burch, Jeremy Slater, and James Gunn, “Coyote vs. Acme“ began filming in 2022 with an estimated budget of around $70 million. In November 2023, however, Warner Bros. announced that it would not be releasing the fully completed film, instead counting the production as a loss for tax purposes. This sparked the ire of many Hollywood creatives, who left angry messages at WB headquarters, canceled meetings with the studio, and flooded social media with their reactions to the decision, alongside stories of the film’s legendarily high-scoring test screenings. Later that month, word hit that WB had reversed its decision and would be shopping the film around to other distributors, with Amazon-MGM, Apple, and Netflix all expressing interest. Despite a massive social media push, though, none of the big studios took it. In March 2025, when all hope that the film would ever see the light of day seemed lost, “Coyote vs. Acme“ was picked up by Ketchup Entertainment, which had just distributed the Looney Tunes feature “The Day The Earth Blew Up“ in North America. Now, in August 2026, “Coyote vs. Acme“ is finally here. But does it live up to the hype? Could any film live up to that backstory?
After decades of trying and failing (and failing, and failing, and…) to catch the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote is at his wit’s end. After an Acme Magnet Glove and a pair of Acme Rocket Skates malfunction, he drags himself back to his cave, littered with the detritus of all his past failures, and gets started on his next plan. But before he can, an oddly perfect advertisement appears on the TV: “Have you ever gotten into a catapult hoping to be gently and sensibly flown to a destination of your choosing only to be violently piledrived face first into the ground?“ Why, yes, he has! And with that, Wile knows exactly what he has to do: Find a way into Albuquerque and hire Kevin Avery (Will Forte) of Avery, Jones & Maltese to sue Acme into the ground. The only problem? Kevin has been happily settling nuisance cases with Acme for years, getting his clients a couple hundred dollars at a time, and he doesn’t want to stray outside his comfort zone, let alone put himself in a position where his whole livelihood could be on the line, as it would be going up against a huge, well-connected, well-funded corporation like Acme and its ruthless lead counsel, Buddy Crane (John Cena).
It’s pretty easy to see why, regardless of quality, a massive media conglomerate like Warner Brothers might want to shelve “Coyote vs. Acme”. Burch’s clever screenplay openly bites the hand feeding it, calling out corporate CEOs throwing their weight around, paying off lawmakers, and callously saying that the law is obviously on their side, “because we wrote the law”. The film’s title card even zooms in on the Warner Animation Group logo to reveal it as a “wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corp.“ Perhaps it was always a fantasy that any major studio would release something so thrillingly anti-corporate in the mid-2020s. Still, the fact that Burch, Green, and company got WB to finance this says a lot about the film’s quality. In fact, it’s easy to imagine a world where WB actually released this as planned in 2023, and the studio got roasted anyway by a cynical populace resistant to any corporation pushing a message this progressive (happens to Disney all the time). Instead, the conversation around “Coyote vs. Acme“ is less on the film’s quality and more on whether or not audiences will show up. After all, great reviews didn’t help 2025’s “The Day The Earth Blew Up“ make much more than $15 million in theaters, but that film wasn’t the target of a viral campaign to get it released. Surely the fact that everyone on social media tweeted a hashtag about “Coyote vs. Acme“ means that they’ll pay to see it in theaters and prove WB wrong, right?
That remains to be seen, but the film deserves the audience, and it’s hard to imagine anyone coming away from it unsatisfied. Easily the best live action/animation hybrid since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?“ way back in 1988, “Coyote vs. Acme“ takes place in a world where cartoon characters live fully alongside living humans, and it has filled its human cast flawlessly. Forte, a fabulous pratfaller who’s always fully committed to the bit, is dream casting for any role in which he must interact with cartoons, puppets, and the like. Likewise, you can’t get a much better human villain for such a film than Cena, with his buff, boxy build and strong chin. Tone Bell, Lana Condor, and especially the deadpan Martha Kelly make the motley crew at Avery, Jones & Maltese incredibly endearing despite not having much to do, while P.J. Kelly makes for a hilariously hateable corporate stooge. The real stars here, though, are the animators. The film’s use of clips from classic Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner cartoons sets a high bar for them to meet, and they clear it with ease. This is the smoothest the Looney Tunes have ever looked in a hybrid live-action feature, and the whip-smart visual gags come fast and furious (my favorite is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it gag involving Tweety Bird near the end), paying homage to the old cartoons in the best way possible.
Burch’s screenplay does the same, revealing the brilliance of the original creators to make Wile E. Coyote, a predator, the most unlucky sonofabitch in the whole world. We have watched that poor guy get railroaded by life so many times over so many years that it’s hard to see him as anything other than a victim, even though he’s always plotting bloody murder. Acme’s contention that Wile isn’t using their products as intended isn’t entirely untrue, and the film hilariously leans into this in scene after scene. But the products were still faulty, and even though Kevin doesn’t want to put in the effort to get a real case going against Acme, that doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been getting money from them for his cartoon clients for years. In the end, everyone learns the lessons they have to learn to set the moral arc of the film’s universe back on the path toward justice. The film’s message goes down much easier when it doesn’t come from a massive conglomerate whose CEO wants nothing more than to merge with another massive conglomerate to make himself (and his shareholders) lots of money, even if it can’t fully escape from under the shadow of Warner Bros. “Coyote vs. Acme“ may never be able to be fully separated from its tortured release history, which can easily lead people of a certain persuasion to blindly overrate it solely because it is finally being released despite WB’s attempt to hide it forever. It’s not perfect; the cinematography looks bland at best whenever only live humans fill the frame, and there’s some obviously bad ADR in the film’s early going. But yes, the fact that “Coyote vs. Acme“ is being released, after all that drama, is a net good. The fact that the film is not only good enough to make WB’s decision to shelve it look cowardly and anti-art, but has only gained emotional resonance because of how that drama ties into its own story, is cause for celebration, no matter how much it makes at the box office. “Coyote vs. Acme“ is an unequivocal win for art, but now everyone who tweeted #SaveCoyoteVsAcme has to step up in order to make it a win for commerce, too.
