Why Was This <em>Looney Tunes</em> Movie Almost Shelved for Good?
· The Atlantic
Perhaps the starkest sign that Coyote vs. Acme isn’t your typical children’s movie is that it’s based on a New Yorker article. Yes, it features many Looney Tunes characters that multiple generations know and love, interacting alongside real-life actors in a style similar to prior big-screen efforts, such as Space Jam or Looney Tunes: Back in Action. But the director Dave Green’s film—which opens August 28, after a protracted saga that almost saw it kept from audiences forever—draws from a slyly funny “Shouts & Murmurs” story from 1990. Written by the humorist Ian Frazier, “Coyote v. Acme” has a wry and self-aware premise: What would happen if Wile E. Coyote, the Looney Tune on a constantly unsuccessful hunt for the ever-chipper Road Runner, filed a lawsuit against the (fictional) Acme Corporation for selling him faulty products?
“I thought the baseline idea for the movie was just, like, the funniest thing in the world,” Green told me in a recent interview, reminiscing about when he first signed on to direct the film, back in 2019. He wasn’t the first person in the film industry to be charmed by Frazier’s story. Despite the erudite tone, the simple notion of Wile E. Coyote pursuing legal action was amusing enough to Hollywood producers that various attempts were made to develop it for the screen, dating back to an effort by the producer Scott Rudin in the late 1990s.
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Warner Bros., which owns Looney Tunes, jump-started the latest version of the project in 2018, and Green completed it in 2022. Coyote vs. Acme was initially scheduled to debut the following summer, but it was taken off the schedule early into production; a new release date was never announced. In the fall of 2023, Warner Bros. told the director that the movie would be shelved entirely. The studio reportedly made the call for a tax write-off—the latest in a series of such decisions, as it dealt with debt issues after the pandemic.
Three years later, Coyote vs. Acme is finally entering theaters. After years of limbo, it ended up in the hands of Ketchup Entertainment, an independent distributor that has now become its unlikely savior. The company cut a $50 million deal with Warner Bros. for it last March. “I continued to not believe it, up until now, when I still can’t believe it,” Green said. “It’s a completely surreal reality to check into. But it seems to be happening—I think it’s happening,” he added with a laugh.
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His trepidation is understandable: The path the film took to cinemas reflects Hollywood’s continued post-pandemic instability, even as theatergoing has picked back up. Coyote vs. Acme had reportedly tested well with audiences and featured some of Warner Bros.’ most well-known creations, yet the cancellation suggests the company still expected to lose too much money on the project.
The wildest part of the production, Green admitted, was how easy it was at first. When asked by Warner Bros. to pitch ideas for an adaptation of Frazier’s article, the director proposed something along the lines of a true-crime documentary crossed with a legal drama. To his surprise, the studio didn’t immediately turn him down. “It almost felt like everything was a ‘yes,’ and there were no boundaries. So then I got really excited,” Green said. “They were looking for a take and they were looking for something that would help them narrow in. And, as different as my tonal comparisons were, I think they responded to the fact that there was a take in it.”
Green’s notion was to take the tropes of underdog courtroom movies—he cited The Insider, Erin Brockovich, and A Few Good Men as inspirations—and place cartoon characters within them. The humans they interact with (played by Will Forte, Lana Condor, and John Cena, among others) would treat Wile E. Coyote’s lawsuit with humdrum seriousness. “That’s the kind of behavior that really comes from Looney Tunes historically,” Green said—winking references to grown-up media that its young audience might not understand. “It’s Bugs Bunny in Casablanca or Elmer Fudd at the opera, poking at high art.” That device has become a hallmark of the franchise, with self-aware comedy making up the bulk of its spin-off Tiny Toon Adventures and of Looney Tunes’ spiritual successor, Animaniacs.
The devious extra twist of Coyote vs. Acme, however, comes from watching the Looney Tunes themselves navigate human society, with its mundane rules and morals. The story is set in Albuquerque, and the live-action sequences were shot almost entirely on location, lending the kind of jarring verisimilitude Green was hoping for—the animated elements pop against the dusty backdrop. Wile E. Coyote is still capable of speaking only through hand gestures and written signs, but he’s hoping to get a personal-injury lawyer named Kevin Avery (Forte) to help him sue Acme; the manufacturing company is presented as a corporate juggernaut that sells products to both humans and cartoons, while gleefully cutting corners in the name of profit.
The result is explosively zany. It’s also surprisingly sensitive—a quality often lacking from the anarchic Looney Tunes. In bite-size animated form, Wile E. Coyote has a monomaniacal obsession with destroying the Road Runner that’s designed to be a recurring, villainous gag; here, it’s a sad compulsion, a habit he cannot kick. The turn works because it doesn’t feel dark, but rather sweetly relatable. “What if you treated Wile E. like a person and his pain as real?” Green asked. “Then that kind of led to the path of, like, what if it’s about cartoon characters being treated unfairly? That kind of split the whole thing open in a fun way.”
Green shot the movie in spring 2022, an experience he describes as entirely pleasant. “There was actually a lot of support from even the very highest-up voices at the studio, and they were really positive in reacting to my initial cut,” he recalled. Yet that summer, Warner Bros. made the surprising decision to shelve Batgirl, a $90 million HBO Max production. “That was really scary to us,” Green said. “But we never thought we were in the same danger.” Batgirl seemed plagued by various other corporate maneuvers: a shift away from movies produced exclusively for streaming, and a general impending reset of the DC Comics cinematic universe. (Analysts also believed that Warner Bros. intended to take a write-down on Batgirl, to help alleviate its multibillion-dollar debt.) Still, the decision alarmed many filmmakers, who now had to worry that studios might choose to just delete their work instead of bothering to release it.
Coyote vs. Acme was initially slated to debut July 21, 2023, before Warner Bros. decided to put Barbie in that summer slot. After that, Green remembered, his cast and crew waited for a rescheduled date, which never came. Finally, in November, the studio told him that Coyote vs. Acme would not be released at all. A public outcry from both fans and members of the industry quickly pressured Warner Bros. to shop the movie to other distributors, including Amazon, Apple, and Netflix. The studio’s price tag, however, was reportedly too high for these potential buyers, and Warner Bros. eventually rejected all competing bids to hand it over—an apparent death sentence for Coyote vs. Acme.
Green recalled a fellow director comforting him during this period by saying, “You got away with it. You robbed the bank. You made a courtroom drama for kids starring Looney Tunes characters. In so many ways, this movie should not exist.” Still, as Green told it, the thinking behind pulling Coyote vs. Acme was never fully clear to him. Although it is more complex than a typical kids’ film, the good test-viewing scores and positive critical reception suggest there’s an audience for it. Ketchup Entertainment can’t afford the large marketing budget that a more established studio could have; it is likely looking to recoup costs through international sales and at-home rentals. That Warner Bros. abandoned all of this goodwill and earnings potential, to Green, was somewhat baffling.
But he feels lucky to have finished the film—which he called an “impossibility” for its blend of classic Looney Tunes absurdity and legal-thriller influences—in the first place. Now it has finally escaped containment; Green, it seems, has successfully rewritten his movie’s real-life ending.