Hollywood has no shortage of stories about films that almost didn’t make it, but few have been quite as strange or as public as the saga of Coyote vs. Acme. Warner Bros. Discovery tried to shelve the completed film back in 2023 as a tax write-off, alongside Batgirl, in what became one of the more embarrassing and widely mocked corporate decisions in recent studio history. Social media was not quiet about it. The backlash was real. And now, three years later, the movie has a distributor, a release date, and a trailer that honestly looks like a lot of fun.
The premise comes from a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, formatted as an actual legal document: Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for decades of defective products. The film keeps that conceit intact, with Will Forte playing billboard accident lawyer Kevin Avery, who takes on the case and goes up against Acme’s slick corporate counsel Buddy Crane, played by John Cena. Lana Condor plays Kevin’s niece, Luis Guzman is the judge, and all your favourite Looney Tunes characters, rendered in 2D animation, show up throughout. Sylvester, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn. The whole gang.
What makes this genuinely interesting beyond the novelty is the meta layer baked right into the marketing. The tagline is “The Film Acme Didn’t Want You to See,” which maps perfectly onto the real-life story of Warner Bros. trying to bury it. That’s a rare piece of good fortune for a marketing team, and they’ve used it well. The film is directed by Dave Green and written by Samy Burch, who earned an Oscar nomination for her May December screenplay. That’s a more interesting creative pedigree than you might expect for a Looney Tunes movie.
Ketchup Entertainment picked up the rights in 2025, and the film is now set for theaters on August 28.