Kids, a movie about shockingly misspent youth on the streets of New York City. Dogma, a satirical comedy about religion. Fahrenheit 9/11, a documentary implicating the George W. Bush administration in 9/11-era misdeeds. Coyote vs. Acme, a kid-friendly comedy about Looney Tunes characters in a slapstick legal battle. These movies should not have much of anything in common. (Well, OK, maybe there’s a little bit of Looney Tunes in the Jay and Silent Bob of Dogma.) But thanks to executive interference at Warner Bros., some of the company’s most recognizable and beloved cartoon characters became embroiled in controversy involving, as with the more adult-driven titles mentioned here, a movie getting dropped like a hot potato by its original distributor. Which begs the question… Why?

Coyote vs. Acme: Why Was It Cancelled?

Unlike those more grown-up movies we mentioned, it’s not the content of Coyote vs. Acme that caused Warner Bros. to drop the movie. (It’s a solid PG, a rarity these days.) It’s not the quality, either. (We’ll get to that shortly.) It was part of a cost-saving measure that also claimed the not-yet-finished Batgirl and a Scooby-Doo animated feature. Executives decided it would be more worthwhile to claim these movies as tax write-offs than actually attempt to make money by releasing them. To claim said write-off, the movies would have to be, essentially, locked in a corporate vault and never shown.

The strange thing about Coyote vs. Acme is that the decision was made after the movie was completed, but before hardly anyone had seen it. At a recent screening, stars Will Forte and Lana Condor discussed the surreal experience of getting ready to see the finished film for the first time back in 2023 — it had plenty of post-production work because it involves adding animated characters to a live-action-shot story, meaning there were large pieces of it the stars hadn’t seen for themselves –—only to find out, just days before the screening, that Warner Bros. wasn’t going to actually release it. The money for production and post-production had already been spent. (Batgirl, though done shooting, still needed more post-production to bring it home, and seemed to be caught in a perceived purgatory between “too expensive for just streaming” and “not lavish enough for theaters.”) But the cost of putting the movie in theaters and advertising it was deemed not worth the effort, nor, at first, was the idea of seeking another buyer for the film. (It’s possible that Warner Bros. was reluctant to have another studio handling their Looney Tunes-related intellectual property, which of course raises the question of why they made a movie they wouldn’t release in the first place.)

After a prolonged public outcry among movie fans and animation nerds, as well as some pushback from Hollywood talent wary of their own projects being turned into tax write-offs, Warner Bros. did reverse its decision to bin the movie entirely, and allowed it to be sold off. (Blame corporate pride for their ongoing refusal to just release it themselves.) Eventually, distributor Ketchup Entertainment, a company that also picked up the smaller-scale, all-animated Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up, stepped in and bought the film. It’s releasing Coyote vs. Acme theatrically on Friday, August 28, about two and a half years after it would have likely come out had Warner Bros. stuck with it.

Of course, Ketchup Entertainment doesn’t have quite the same marketing muscle behind it as Warner Bros. There are three or four other wide releases scheduled for that same Friday, on top of four that released the week before, and another four or five that released or expanded the week before that. Among this dozen or so new movies, is Coyote vs. Acme really worth seeing in a theater?

See It or Skip It: Should You See Coyote vs. Acme in Theaters?

It’s not something contemporary audiences have necessarily been trained to do with these characters, despite their big-screen origins in old short subjects. Apart from some schedule-filling compilation films stitching those shorts together with new material, the only Looney Tunes features that have really hit with paying audiences have been the Space Jam movies, which, like Coyote vs. Acme, combine cartoon characters with live-action actors and environments. They also make the characters subservient to a variety of basketball stars and, in Space Jam: A New Legacy, miscellaneous studio IP. This should not be surprising, given that the movies are about the famously antagonistic Looney Tunes teaming up to play basketball; they’re like one of those cheesy Bugs-and-Taz athletic jackets from 1993 come to life, more merchandising opportunity than feature film.

Though Coyote vs. Acme is not an ensemble movie, it places Looney Tunes characters front and center. Dave Green’s film reintroduces Wile E. Coyote, the silently scheming fanatic who spends his day attempting to catch and eat his nemesis/ideal meal: the Roadrunner, who zips around the desert, smiling and issuing the occasional “beep beep!” The Coyote’s endlessly backfiring schemes are powered, as in the old Chuck Jones-directed shorts, by a variety of products from the Acme corporation. That fake brand has become a winking piece of lore in various Warner Bros.-affiliated cartoons since then, but at the time of the Coyote/Roadrunner shorts that ran first in movie theaters in 1950s and then on Saturday mornings for decades afterwards, it was just a combination of placeholder and running gag. It was a cue that some generic company was churning out a variety of strange products and devices that Wile E. Coyote had no choice but to purchase. (Where else would you get your catapults or giant magnets?) Coyote vs. Acme positions that company as a modern multinational conglomerate; selling malfunctioning junk to cartoon characters is just one of many business arms.

Coyote, fed up with his stymied efforts, approaches low-rent, settlement-happy lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte, MacGruber himself) to sue Acme. (The film’s premise, expanded to feature length by screenwriter Samy Burch, is based on a New Yorker humor piece from decades ago.) Kevin wants to settle, but his intern and niece Paige (Lana Condor) urges him to actually put up a fight, while Acme’s slick head counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena) pulls out all the stops to undermine the underdogs’ case. As the legal team attempts to dig into what may be an Acme-related conspiracy, the movie finds room for Looney Tunes both major (yes, Bugs, Daffy, and Porky all appear, albeit briefly) and minor (remember Cool Cat? Probably not! He kind of sucks!).

That’s what really comes through watching Coyote vs. Acme, and makes the original studio’s indifference to it especially galling: This thing was obviously made with love. Not just love for the financial upside of a storied IP, but actual love for the Looney Tunes characters and the Coyote/Roadrunner shorts in particular, which are excerpted, recreated, and elaborated upon here in some of the movie’s most fun sequences. It’s exactly the love that’s missing from a movie like Space Jam 2, and it won’t be lost on anyone with knowledge of the film’s backstory that this is a movie about standing up to an all-powerful corporation that feels entitled to control its narrative at every turn.

There are times when the movie doesn’t quite nail the Looney Tunes tone, feeling more akin to the fuzzier warmth of a Muppet movie or a cheeky legal footnote to Who Framed Roger Rabbit than the old Warner Bros. energy reincarnated for 2026. For one thing, the balance between well-phrased wisecracks and silent comedy sometimes feels off, because modern comedies tend to be verbal to a fault, minus the grace of old screwballs. Here, even the silent Coyote’s trademark signs are wordier than they need to be. On the other hand, the movie’s other influences are sound. Who doesn’t enjoy Muppet movies or Who Framed Roger Rabbit?!

While there’s an undercurrent of sentimentality that you wouldn’t catch in any of the best Looney Tunes shorts, the characters do feel true to themselves. Wile E. Coyote in particular has a mid-movie twist on his motivations that is both hilarious and perfectly in-character. Not every joke lands as punchy as a perfect seven-minute cartoon, but there are plenty of great, silly gags, like a scene where Cena, summoning his full commitment, angrily squares off with Tweety.

A star like Cena might help lure in a younger audience that may not be as well-versed in these characters as past generations, but those kids may be surprised by how much they enjoy the movie. Though many people experienced them on television, Looney Tunes shorts were made to be experienced in a movie theater, and Coyote vs. Acme has been produced with a similar care, blending cartoon slapstick with live-action “cartooniness” with an eye-filling dedication that cries out for a big screen and an appreciative crowd.

Coyote vs. Acme should be seen in a theater not just to stick it to a real-life mega-corporation for not having the faith to release it, but because it offers plenty of slapstick bang for your multiplex buck.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.