Although it’s not officially released until this coming Friday, it appears that a number of UK cinemas are showing limited previews of Coyote vs Acme this week. This included our local Vue cinema in Halifax, and so the three of us went along on Saturday to watch it.
The film is inspired by a 1990 essay in the New Yorker, where Wile E Coyote sues the Acme Corporation for all of the defective gadgets that he has bought from them in his quest to catch his nemesis, Roadrunner. According to this interview with the film’s lead scriptwriter, James Gunn (yes, that James Gunn) pitched the film to Warner Brothers about a decade ago, but it took until 2022 for production to finally begin. And by 2023, the film was finished, and ready for release.
A Coyote Ugly Cancellation
So why has it taken three years for a film to get from a finished state to being in cinemas? Well, because Warner Brothers decided to shelve Coyote vs Acme, and take a $30 million tax write off instead. However, this was only after they had done several test screenings, where the film was apparently positively received by audiences. And so started a campaign to get it released.
What this means is that, whilst this is a Warner Brothers film, with Warner Brothers characters, it has been distributed by Ketchup Entertainment. They bought the rights for $50 million, and have scheduled a release in cinemas to, at long last, allow the public to watch it.
Incidentally, Ketchup Entertainment released another Looney Tunes film in 2024, The Day The Earth Blew Up, which completely passed me by.
So is Coyote vs Acme worth seeing?
In a word, yes. I quite liked it, giving it 3 ½ stars on Letterboxd. It’s one of those films that works on multiple levels – kids will like the typical Looney Tunes slapstick humour and indeed our ten-year-old enjoyed it. My wife Christine, meanwhile, is a big Looney Tunes fan and understood more of the in-jokes, of which this film is full of. She therefore thought it was excellent.
Of course, Wile E Coyote and Roadrunner appear in this film, but there are cameos from almost every other Looney Tunes character too. And you can tell that the scriptwriters were very familiar with the source material as it feels like an extension of the existing Looney Tunes universe. It’s not a reboot – the characters that you probably remember from your childhood are here and are just as you would expect them to be.
Watching a Hollywood film that costs tens of millions of dollars to make shouldn’t feel like a charitable act. But it did feel good being able to watch a film that some studio bigwig decided wasn’t going to be released. And it’s worth noting that Coyote vs Acme was not the only film to fall victim – there’s also a completed Batgirl film out there that hasn’t been released, and a Scooby Doo film was cancelled part-way through production (ruh-roh). Maybe, if Coyote vs Acme does prove to be a box office hit, these two films might also see the light of day, rather than being written off for tax reasons.
