Three years after Warner Bros. Discovery finished the film and then declined to release it at all, "Coyote vs. Acme" opened in North American theaters on Friday — and the reviews reading like a rebuke of the studio that tried to bury it. Distributed by the independent studio Ketchup Entertainment on roughly 3,500 screens, the live-action/animated Looney Tunes comedy has become one of the more improbable theatrical releases of the year: a $70 million studio picture that its original owner wrote off as a tax loss rather than put in front of an audience.
The film, starring Will Forte as a lawyer who represents Wile E. Coyote in a product-liability suit against the Acme Corporation, wrapped principal photography in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the spring of 2022 and was finished by the fall of 2023. On November 9, 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery told the production it would not release the movie in any format — not theatrically, not on HBO Max, not to another buyer — and instead booked an estimated $30 million tax write-off on the negative, according to Deadline's reporting at the time. Cast and crew learned of the decision only after the film was already complete.
From Write-Off to Release
The shelving was the third such write-off-driven cancellation at the studio in roughly a year, following "Batgirl" and the animated "Scoob! Holiday Haunt," and it drew immediate criticism from directors, screenwriters and animators who argued a finished film was being erased purely for accounting purposes. Within days, Warner Bros. reversed itself and agreed to let the filmmakers shop the picture elsewhere. It took until March 2025 for a deal to close: Ketchup Entertainment, the distributor that had earlier rescued another abandoned Looney Tunes project, "The Day the Earth Blew Up," paid roughly $50 million for worldwide rights, according to Deadline.
Ketchup Entertainment chief executive Gareth West called the deal a chance "to bring this film to audiences worldwide," saying the picture was "a perfect blend of nostalgia and modern storytelling" aimed at longtime fans and newcomers alike. Directed by Dave Green from a screenplay by Samy Burch, based on a story she developed with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, the film mixes Forte, Lana Condor and John Cena with the classic Chuck Jones-era Looney Tunes cast, voiced by Eric Bauza.
A Verdict Three Years in the Making
Critics who finally got to see the film this month have been largely positive: it holds a 95% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from more than 140 reviews and a "generally favorable" 77 on Metacritic. Several reviews leaned into the film's own backstory as part of the story.
"It's a funny love letter to the Looney Tunes but a gigantic middle finger to Warner Bros."
Hunter V. Norris, AZFamily
Forte, who has spent much of the past year publicly advocating for the film's release, said after seeing the finished cut that "all the years of hard work, dedication and love shows in every frame." Green, the director, has said the team was "determined to honor the legacies of these historic characters and get them right," even after the film sat unseen for two years.
Industry analysts project a modest opening in the $12 million to $18 million range for the weekend, a fraction of what "Spider-Man: Brand New Day" is still pulling in its fifth week of release, but respectable for a mid-budget family comedy competing against a superhero juggernaut. Ketchup Entertainment has said it plans a wide promotional push built around the film's rescue narrative, betting that curiosity about the "movie Warner Bros. didn't want you to see" will drive turnout beyond the usual family-comedy audience.
For Hollywood more broadly, the film's arrival closes out a saga that became a cautionary tale about post-merger cost-cutting: a finished, well-reviewed studio movie sat on a shelf for two years before reaching audiences, and did so only because of public pressure and an independent distributor willing to take a bet on it.
