Time to Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is With 'Coyote vs. Acme'

It's all good news that this Looney Tunes movie is finally seeing daylight, right?

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Earlier this week a miracle happened. After months of speculation regarding the fate of Warner Bros. animated feature Coyote vs. Acme — a film many thought had been disappeared at year’s end after failing to find a buyer — it has found a home. Ketchup Entertainment, the company that also put out the Looney Tunes movie The Day the Earth Blew Up, decided to purchase the movie for $50 million. This is certainly great news as audiences will have the ability to see the movie, but it brings up a few questions about the future of dealmaking like this, Warner Bros. as a company, and how we celebrate (or destroy) cinematic history.

The predominant question I keep going back to, and it inspired this headline, is will audiences put their money where their mouth is? Despite theaters continuing to struggle to bring in audiences — and studios trying hard to convince them to increase the theatrical window — audiences are still ingrained to wait for VOD. Despite the cries for original content, movies like Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag aren’t exactly becoming instant blockbusters.

The Day the Earth Blew Up, which should cater to much of the same audiences as Coyote vs. Acme barely broke even and that movie only had a $15 million dollar budget. Coyote vs. Acme has a respectable $70 million dollar budget. Can audiences band together to actually pony up the dough for a movie they desperately wanted to save?

Infamy might be to Coyote vs. Acme’s advantage. The very public anger from animation fans and movies lovers after Warner Bros. plans to bury it were revealed could easily be played up by Ketchup’s marketing. “The movie Warner Bros. didn’t want you to see!” But that knife cuts both ways by reminding audiences about the movies that we still won’t be seeing in a theater near us, namely Batgirl.

That movie, starring Leslie Grace as the title character, was deleted for a tax write-off in 2022 for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was the movie’s presumed low-quality, as it was built for a Max release as opposed to a theatrical one, but we’ll never know. It’s hard not to wish Batgirl had the same group of saviors wanting to see it released. It could very well be terrible but, hell, let the audience decide. We’ve seen studios dump titles in turnaround and hope another distributor comes along. There is an air of, bare minimum, Coyote vs. Acme’s sale being a great way for WB to make money, no matter what. They sell the movie, collect $50 mil and move on.

And, really, it does feel like a backward victory because, the same week Coyote vs. Acme got a reprieve the studio announced plans to bulldoze the original buildings on the Warners lot where the Looney Tunes were created. If you live in Los Angeles you’re used to seeing historical icons destroyed with little consideration of their significance but this doesn’t feel like a victory but a rescue mission for a group of characters that have failed to be introduced to a new audience. It’s reminiscent of Disney’s treatment of the Muppets, in the sense that they acknowledge their’s a built-in audience for them but they still mire them in small scale projects or quickie product placements.

Do I think the release of Coyote vs. Acme will bring us more Looney Tunes projects? Sadly, no. The lack of appreciation for 2D animations and animators, and the lack of institutional knowledge on why the Looney Tunes work leaves me thinking projects like these will continue to be unicorns in the cinematic landscape. Will I be seeing Coyote vs. Acme? Damn right I will be, if only to see what the studio thought wasn’t worth saving.

Do you think Warner Bros. made a mistake with this? Is this doomed to be a one-off Looney Tunes project? Drop an answer in the comments below.