Coyote vs. Acme (2026)
The Movie ACME Didn’t Want You To See.
Against all odds, this coyote finally gets his day.
There is something wonderfully appropriate about the fact that Coyote vs. Acme spent years attempting to reach cinemas, repeatedly had the finish line yanked away from it and somehow kept coming back for another try. If any movie was going to experience the Wile E. Coyote treatment before audiences even had the chance to see it, it was probably this one.
Directed by Dave Green, who had already dipped into cartoon chaos with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows in 2016, Coyote vs. Acme was initially slated for release on July 21, 2023. Warner Bros. removed it from the calendar in April 2022, handing that date to Barbie, before the real controversy arrived the following year. In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery announced that the already-completed film would instead be shelved, amid reports that the studio intended to take an estimated $30 million tax write-down.
Following a substantial backlash, Warner Bros. allowed the filmmakers to shop the movie elsewhere. Ketchup Entertainment eventually acquired the worldwide distribution rights in March 2025 for a reported $50 million, paving the way for the film to finally reach cinemas in 2026.
After spending several years trapped inside Hollywood’s equivalent of an Acme crate, Wile E. Coyote was finally free. The irony is almost too perfect. Here is a movie about a determined little guy taking on an enormous corporation that has repeatedly screwed him over — made by filmmakers whose completed movie was nearly prevented from ever being seen by an enormous corporation. Sometimes the joke really does write itself.
Green directs from a screenplay by May December (2023) writer Samy Burch, who shares story credit with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater. The concept takes inspiration from Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece “Coyote v. Acme”, which imagined the legal ramifications of Wile E. Coyote spending years purchasing increasingly dangerous products from a company whose rockets, magnets, explosives and other assorted death traps have a fairly questionable success rate.
After decades of being blown up, flattened, launched off cliffs and generally discovering that the Acme Corporation has a rather flexible interpretation of the phrase “fit for purpose”, Wile E. Coyote has finally had enough. Rather than ordering another box of dynamite, he gets himself a lawyer. That lawyer is Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a struggling billboard attorney who is more than a little reluctant to take on the case — at least until Coyote more or less tricks him into it. Before Kevin quite realizes what he has agreed to, he is representing Wile E. Coyote in a lawsuit against Acme. Standing on the opposite side of the courtroom is Buddy Crane (John Cena), Acme’s slick, aggressively confident attorney, while Lana Condor joins the madness as Kevin’s niece and assistant, Paige.
It is a wonderfully ridiculous premise, but perhaps the biggest surprise is how seriously Coyote vs. Acme takes the characters underneath all the falling anvils. Green and Burch understand that simply dumping Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and company into the real world isn’t enough. The fun comes from finding places for these characters within it. And Coyote vs. Acme is very good at that. Of course, this particular concept has been done better before. Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) remains the superior example of building a story around animated characters existing alongside humans. Coyote vs. Acme never quite reaches that level, but it understands enough about why that formula works to make its own version consistently entertaining.
The movie exists in a universe where humans and Toons simply coexist, allowing familiar Looney Tunes faces to appear without every cameo feeling as though somebody has stopped everything to wave a piece of intellectual property at the audience. Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Tweety, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester and others are incorporated into the world in ways that frequently feel clever rather than obligatory. Some appearances are substantial. Others are basically elaborate punchlines. Most importantly, they actually feel like the Looney Tunes.
There is a temptation with modern franchise filmmaking to sand away the stranger edges of decades-old characters in an attempt to make them more palatable to contemporary audiences. Coyote vs. Acme mostly avoids that. It embraces the absurdity. Coyote is still Coyote. He remains obsessive, endlessly determined and convinced that the next ridiculously complicated plan will definitely be the one that succeeds, despite approximately 75 years of evidence suggesting otherwise. He is also largely silent. That decision is important.
The movie doesn’t suddenly give Wile E. a celebrity voice and have him spend 100 minutes cracking jokes. His expressions, signs, increasingly desperate reactions and battered body continue doing most of the talking. It preserves something essential about the character while allowing the story to reveal more of him than those classic shorts ever needed to. The same is true of the Road Runner.
What begins as another familiar chase gradually develops into something unexpectedly sweet, with the screenplay examining what the relationship between these two characters actually means. Is Road Runner really Coyote’s enemy? Is Coyote genuinely trying to catch him anymore? Or, after all these years, has the chase itself become the relationship? That idea gives Coyote vs. Acme considerably more heart than might be expected from a movie in which one of its protagonists can be flattened into the thickness of a pancake and recover several seconds later. Their relationship is reframed without destroying the joke that has kept them running through the desert for generations. It becomes a story about persistence, purpose and, strangely enough, friendship. After spending his entire existence trying to catch the Road Runner, perhaps the worst thing that could happen to Wile E. Coyote isn’t another Acme product exploding in his face. Perhaps it would be finally having nothing left to chase.
The human cast understands the assignment too. Will Forte makes an appealingly frazzled straight man as Kevin, giving the animated insanity something recognizably human to bounce against. Forte has always been comfortable looking ridiculous on screen, which proves particularly useful when his co-stars operate according to cartoon physics. Lana Condor brings plenty of likeability to Paige and works nicely as the slightly more grounded presence within Kevin’s increasingly bizarre legal battle.
But the standout is John Cena. Cena has become remarkably good at understanding exactly how big a performance needs to be, and here the answer is very, very big. His Buddy Crane is smug, theatrical and hilariously self-satisfied, played with the kind of exaggerated confidence that makes him feel like a human being who somehow wandered out of a Looney Tunes cartoon himself. Cena doesn’t merely react to the animated characters surrounding him; he matches their energy. He knows precisely what movie he is in. There are moments when a facial expression or physical movement from Cena is funnier than the actual dialogue, and his willingness to commit completely to the ridiculousness makes Buddy one of the movie’s greatest weapons.
Visually, Coyote vs. Acme also makes strong use of its live-action/animation combination. There is a tactile quality to much of the interaction that helps sell the illusion. Characters grab things. They collide. They chase each other. Cartoon objects invade real environments. Occasionally, the laws of animation themselves seem to infect the physical world. One of the highlights comes during the road sequence involving the oversized Toon gloves, where a human character puts them on and sends a shockwave ripping through the roadway. It’s a wonderfully inventive set piece that turns Looney Tunes slapstick into physical mayhem — visually playful and just dangerous-looking enough to give the destruction some genuine impact. The best action scenes don’t merely place animated characters over live-action footage. They ask what would actually happen if Looney Tunes physics suddenly started operating in our world. Apparently, the answer involves a lot of property damage.
Not everything works quite as well. For all the invention and sheer determination that finally got it onto the screen, Coyote vs. Acme still has a few cracks beneath the paint. At 103 minutes, the movie occasionally feels stretched beyond the natural rhythm of characters originally built for seven-minute bursts. The corporate conspiracy and legal plotting can also take over for too long, while the mystery at the center becomes increasingly muddled — and starts making less sense the more closely you look at it. The comedy can be uneven too. There are inspired visual gags sitting alongside jokes that are considerably easier to see coming, and not every human character is given enough material to compete with the animated icons wandering through the frame. But even when a joke misfires, another one generally isn’t far behind. More importantly, there is genuine affection behind all of it.
This isn’t a movie embarrassed by the Looney Tunes or desperately trying to reinvent them into something cooler. It understands that these characters are already cool precisely because they’re ridiculous. Give Coyote a magnetic glove, some metal pellets, a speeding truck and another supposedly foolproof Acme plan and, naturally, he is still going to be the one who ends up flattened. That’s entertaining. No cinematic universe required.
Perhaps that is why Coyote vs. Acme ultimately connects as well as it does. Beneath the corporate satire, courtroom antics, explosions and nostalgic cameos is a surprisingly sincere understanding of why Wile E. Coyote has remained such an enduring character. He fails. Constantly. Spectacularly. Sometimes painfully. And then he gets back up.
Considering everything that happened to the movie itself, that message now carries considerably more weight than its filmmakers could possibly have anticipated when cameras started rolling. A completed movie was shelved and came dangerously close to disappearing altogether, only to find another distributor and finally make its way onto cinema screens. Wile E. Coyote would probably appreciate the persistence.
Coyote vs. Acme may not reach the live-action/animation heights of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but it doesn’t need to. Dave Green has delivered an energetic and surprisingly heartfelt celebration of Looney Tunes history that knows how to use its enormous catalogue of familiar faces without forgetting the particular coyote whose name is on the poster. Forte gives the story its heart, Condor brings warmth and Cena practically steals the movie every time Buddy Crane enters the frame.
Most surprisingly, it gives Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner something approaching an actual relationship without ruining the beautifully simple dynamic that made them icons in the first place. After everything Wile E. Coyote has survived, it turns out his greatest trick wasn’t catching the Road Runner. It was finally making it into cinemas.
Beep beep.
3.5 / 5 – Great
Reviewed by Stu Cachia (S-Littner)
Coyote vs. Acme is distributed by Ketchup Entertainment
