written by Jason T. Bailey, The New York Times

It all seemed so straightforward.

When Warner Bros. first announced the film “Coyote vs. Acme” — a hybrid of live action and animation inspired by the studio’s Looney Tunes shorts — it sounded like a no-brainer. Here was a fresh take on some of Warner Bros.’ most beloved intellectual property, the kind of family-friendly nostalgia that generates big box office returns while introducing durable characters to new audiences who then become eager consumers of the studio’s valuable library. (Warner Bros. did it before with Looney Tunes, making a mint with the 1996 film “Space Jam.”)

The project came with a compelling angle already in place: It was inspired by Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece in The New Yorker, “Coyote v. Acme,” which imagined the Looney Tunes mainstay Wile E. Coyote taking the Acme Corporation to court for its many defective products that had repeatedly thwarted his pursuit of the Road Runner.

“I actually knew the article, because I had been at Warner Bros., in and around animation there for years, and that thing was kind of legend,” Chris deFaria, one of the film’s producers, said in a Zoom interview.

Dave Green, the film’s director, landed the job by pinpointing how to translate Frazier’s authentic legalese into cinematic terms, drawing comparisons to courtroom dramas like “A Few Good Men” and corporate thrillers like “The Insider.”

Green’s attachment was announced in December 2019, and he and deFaria set about finding the right scribe for the job. Several writers had taken passes, including James Gunn, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Superman” director (though he joined as the film’s other producer). The team eventually landed on Samy Burch, the casting director-turned-screenwriter whose script “May December,” an eventual Oscar nominee, had not yet been produced.

Will Forte and John Cena were cast as Coyote’s attorney and Acme’s ruthless corporate lawyer; filming began in spring 2022. “It was a wonderful shoot,” Green said in a Zoom interview. “The cast, the crew, everyone was so on board for this project and understood its tone, and were just excited to collaborate.” Warner Bros. seemed high on the project as well; late in 2020, Deadline and Variety reported that the studio had set a theatrical release date of July 21, 2023. But a representative for Warner Bros. Discovery said in a recent telephone interview that “the trades have largely misreported significant pieces of this,” and insisted that when the picture was greenlit in December 2020, it was for release on HBO Max, the company’s streaming service. (Both Green and deFaria said they were told it would be released theatrically.)

Whatever the case, in April 2022, the studio announced that on July 21, 2023, it would instead release Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” in theaters — igniting a moviegoing phenomenon.

But as days and then weeks passed, no new date for “Coyote vs. Acme” was announced, “which got me concerned immediately,” deFaria said. There was nothing concrete, however, until his phone rang on Nov. 8, 2023, while he was on the Warner lot making arrangements for a screening of the completed film a few days later for cast and crew members.

“It was just remarkably unceremonial and fast,” he recalled. “It came from the two heads of the studio at the time, who simply said, ‘Hey Chris, just want to let you know we’re not going to be releasing “Coyote vs. Acme” in theaters, and its future is up in the air.’ Period. And I said, ‘I don’t understand what that means.’” According to deFaria, they provided few details, nor much of an explanation; when he asked what was going to happen to the film, “They said: ‘We don’t know. It may not get released at all.’”

The story hit the trades the next day. Industry observers noted that the film was greenlit under previous leadership, before WarnerMedia merged with Discovery and appointed David Zaslav as its chief executive; comparisons were also drawn to the studio’s decision the previous year to indefinitely shelve its productions of “Batgirl” and “Scoob!: Holiday Haunt.” But those films were not yet completed, and their cancellation could save the studio additional postproduction costs. “Coyote vs. Acme” was finished and only its distribution and marketing costs remained, which could have easily been minimized by releasing the project on HBO Max. The company’s official explanation was couched in corporate language. “With the re-launch of Warner Bros. Pictures Animation in June, the studio has shifted its global strategy to focus on theatrical releases,” a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group said in a statement. “With this new direction, we have made the difficult decision not to move forward with ‘Coyote vs. Acme.’”

Green was given no additional details. “I had just been told that their strategy had changed, and it was basically left there,” he said.

“Obviously, I felt it personally,” the screenwriter Samy Burch said in a Zoom interview before echoing a concern shared by Green and deFaria. “When you think about the amount of people, the amount of craftsmen that worked on this movie, that are figuring out, ‘How do we crunch this car in practical effects, so then we can animate a piano falling?’ Dave had just put so much into the film, and so it was a really shocking, sad thing.”

That sense of shock was felt throughout the industry, prompting an outpouring of outrage from filmmakers and fans over what they saw as the studio’s willingness to shelve a finished film for the sake of its short-term bottom line. Four days later, Warner Bros. Discovery tried to stem the tide of bad press by announcing that it would consider selling “Coyote vs. Acme” to other distributors; Netflix, Apple, Amazon Prime Video and Paramount all reportedly expressed interest.

But no deal was made at that time. “I don’t know how sincere the effort was,” deFaria said. And in late February 2024, Warner Bros. Discovery took a $115 million write-down for the third quarter of 2023, part of a “strategic realignment plan associated with the Warner Bros. Pictures Animation group.” Zaslav (whose pay for 2023, the year the picture was put on the chopping block, was reported as nearly $50 million) said that it took “real courage” to shelve films like “Coyote vs. Acme.”

And that, it seemed, was that. “I had a year where I think what I had rationalized was, this is going to be at the Turner Classic Movies Festival 2058,” Burch said.

But Green refused to say die. “Maybe I’m really bad at understanding the word ‘no’ or something,” he said, “but we never felt like there was no hope, or there was no way.”

As the months passed, one dim ray of hope appeared. In August 2024, the independent film production and distribution company Ketchup Entertainment announced its acquisition of “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” another Looney Tunes feature abandoned by Warner. It was a smaller and less expensive picture than “Coyote vs. Acme,” conceived of and executed as an HBO Max original. It proved a modest success for Ketchup when it was released in theaters in spring 2025. (In a twist, the movie is currently streaming on HBO Max.)

Just a few days after the release of “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” Green turned his phone on while leaving a movie theater, “and I had a missed phone call from a studio executive,” he recalled. “They told me, ‘Tomorrow there’s going to be a news break.’”

It was the news he’d been waiting a year and a half for: Ketchup was expected to make a $50 million offer for distribution rights to “Coyote vs. Acme.” The sale to Ketchup was completed soon after. In the summer of 2025, the company scheduled the picture for an August 2026 release; when the first trailer went online in April, it racked up more than 25 million views in its first 24 hours. The marketing winked at the offscreen controversies, with its tagline, “The movie Acme doesn’t want you to see,” underlining the film’s themes of corporate malfeasance, profit over people and the dangers of monopolies — ideas that play more forcefully now than they might have in an unobstructed release.

Was it worth all the trouble? “We always dreamed of having the audience connect with it in ways that were nostalgic for what they remembered, relevant for what they’re experiencing today and warm and emotional,” deFaria said. “We’re checking all those boxes right now, and we probably wouldn’t have checked a couple of those boxes had it not been this martyr-slash-underdog hero story of the film itself. So where am I today? I think this is a perfect outcome. Possibly.”

Green — who posted in November 2023 that “in the spirit of Wile E. Coyote, resilience and persistence win the day” — concurred. “At its foundation, this is a story about an underdog who gets crushed by a giant corporation, and rises up,” he said. “That is, in a nutshell, what has happened so beautifully with the movie, which is really incredible. And it’s hard to articulate truly how I feel in this moment, because it is totally surreal.”

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