Coyote vs. Acme (2026) Review

I haven’t watched Coyote vs. Acme. I’ve seen the trailers and clips, and I’ve read enough of the critical and audience response to be confident about where this lands. The score on this page is IMDb’s audience rating, not mine, and I’ll replace it with my own once I have sat through the film properly.

What makes me comfortable running IMDb’s number on a film I haven’t seen is the shape of the reception. Critical scores can be bought with a good marketing push and a friendly screening. Audience enthusiasm three weekends deep cannot. This film is holding, and holding is the only box office number that tells you whether people liked it.

The Setup

Wile E. Coyote has spent his entire existence buying products from the same company and being maimed by every one of them. In 1990, Ian Frazier wrote a short piece for The New Yorker imagining what would happen if he sued. That’s the whole premise, and it’s the kind of idea that either works completely or collapses in the first ten minutes.

Dave Green directed. Samy Burch wrote the screenplay, developing the story with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater. Will Forte plays Kevin Avery, a billboard personal injury lawyer with nothing left to lose. John Cena is the opposing counsel. Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzman, Martha Kelly, P.J. Byrne and Kenneth Choi fill out the human side, and Eric Bauza voices the Looney Tunes characters, as he’s for years now.

The film opens in 1992 in a world where cartoon characters live among people, with an Acme scientist leaking a message before the company imprisons him inside a portable hole. Thirty years later the case goes to court. It runs an hour and forty-three minutes and is rated PG.

The Legal Comedy Structure

Putting Looney Tunes in a courtroom is a smarter structural choice than it first appears, and the reason is mechanical.

The problem with feature-length Looney Tunes has always been that the characters were built for seven minutes. A gag escalates, it pays off, the short ends. Stretch that across ninety minutes and you get Space Jam, where the plot is a delivery system for cameos and the cartoon logic stops meaning anything because nothing has consequences.

A trial fixes that. Legal procedure is inherently structured around escalation and consequence. Evidence gets introduced, objections get sustained, and every absurd thing that ever happened to Wile E. Coyote becomes admissible. The format does the work that a normal plot cannot, because it takes the sixty years of slapstick that already exist and treats them as a case history.

It also solves the tone problem. Cartoon violence is funny when it’s weightless and disturbing when it’s not. A courtroom lets the film acknowledge the injuries, which is where the comedy lives, without asking the audience to feel bad about them.

The Termite Terrace Detail

The law firm Wile E. Coyote hires is called Avery, Jones and Maltese.

Tex Avery created Daffy Duck. Chuck Jones created Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner and directed What’s Opera, Doc? Michael Maltese wrote most of the Coyote shorts through the forties and fifties. The human characters are named Kevin Avery, Paige Avery, Dottie Jones and Sal Maltese.

Nobody in the audience needs to catch that. It’s there because the people making the film knew whose work they were standing on. That’s a different attitude from the one that produced Space Jam: Back in Action, and a very different attitude from the one that shelved this film.

The Release Story

You cannot separate the film from what happened to it, and I wouldn’t try.

Warner Bros. Discovery finished Coyote vs. Acme, screened it, and in November 2023 decided not to release it so the company could claim a tax write-off. The budget was around $70 million. The crew learned about it after the fact. Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt went the same way.

The reaction was severe enough that the company reversed course on selling it inside four days. Netflix and Sony were reportedly interested and Warner Bros. wouldn’t lower its price. Representative Joaquin Castro asked the Biden administration to look into the practice of deleting completed films for tax purposes. The picture sat in limbo until March 2025, when Ketchup Entertainment bought worldwide rights for about $50 million. Same distributor that rescued The Day the Earth Blew Up after Warner declined to release that one too.

Dave Green called the eventual release date a crazy miracle, and pointed out that the film’s own subject is persistence in the face of a company that keeps failing you. He’s not wrong, and the metaphor isn’t subtle, and it doesn’t need to be.

The Commercial Performance

It premiered at San Diego Comic-Con on 25 July 2026 and opened in the United States on 28 August.

The opening weekend took $15.9 million, the largest in Ketchup Entertainment’s history, and beat Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars the same frame. The second weekend dropped only 28.8 percent, taking $14.5 million across Labor Day, which put it third at the global box office. Worldwide total stands at $44.2 million, with $37 million of that domestic.

The hold is the number that matters. A 28.8 percent second-weekend drop on a family film means word of mouth is doing the work, and word of mouth is the only marketing Ketchup could afford against a studio release. The film is a few million from clearing what its distributor paid for it, which will make the $70 million write-off look like exactly what it was.

Critics put it at 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 77 on Metacritic. Those are numbers a Pixar release would take.

Craft: What the Courtroom Solves That Space Jam Could Not

There’s a lesson here for anyone building a long-form story out of short-form material, and it applies well beyond animation.

Space Jam existed to sell Michael Jordan merchandise, and you can feel that in the architecture. The plot is a container. The Looney Tunes characters are guests in their own film, and the reason it doesn’t work as comedy is that nothing they do carries forward. Every gag is a self-contained unit dropped into a story that would proceed identically without it.

Coyote vs. Acme takes the opposite approach. It asks what would happen if the gags had consequences, and then builds the entire structure around answering that. The sixty years of injuries aren’t references. They’re evidence. That converts a catalog of disconnected bits into something with cumulative weight. That’s the actual problem that’s defeated every attempt at a Looney Tunes feature since 1996.

If you’re adapting anything episodic into a single long narrative, that’s the move. Find the frame that makes the existing material add up instead of merely repeating. A trial does it. A funeral does it. An investigation does it. What doesn’t work is a plot that runs alongside the material without ever needing it.

Is Coyote vs. Acme as good as people say?

Nine out of ten, pending a viewing.

The premise is sound, the structural choice is genuinely clever, the people who made it clearly understood the characters, and the audience is turning up three weekends in and telling other people to go. That combination is rare and it’s not something a marketing budget can fake, particularly when the film didn’t have one.

The point I keep coming back to is that this film was declared worthless by the company that made it. A finished, tested, well-liked picture was assigned a value of zero for accounting purposes, and the market has now returned a different answer in eleven days. That gap between what an asset earns and what somebody with a spreadsheet decides it’s worth is the whole story of how Warner Bros. dismantled Looney Tunes over sixty years.

Wile E. Coyote spends his entire career being told by a corporation that the product will work this time. Then he sues. It’s a better joke than anyone at Warner Bros. Discovery seems to have realized.

Frequently Asked Questions