It’s the best Looney Tunes movie ever and the best comedy of 2026.
It took a long time for Coyote vs. ACME to make it to theaters, and it wasn’t because it missed a left turn in Albuquerque.
Coyote vs. ACME began as a comedic article in a 1990 issue of The New Yorker by writer Ian Frazier. It was a mock court filing in which the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote brings suit against the ACME corporation for all the faulty products he's tangled with while trying to catch the Road Runner in the classic Looney Tunes animated shorts originated by director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese.
In 2015, James Gunn first pitched the idea for a film adaptation of the article to Warner Bros. It was finally greenlit in 2018 and began filming in 2022 under the direction of Dave Green (Earth to Echo) with a script by Samy Burch (May December). It wrapped after a few months and then went through post-production like normal.
In November 2023, the anvil fell. Warner Bros. Discovery announced that, despite the film already having been completed, the studio was shelving it, along with a few other films, and claiming them as a tax loss instead.
Fans of Looney Tunes and industry professionals alike rallied against Warner's penny-pinching CEO, David Zaslav, as did Coyote vs. ACME stars Eric Bauza and Will Forte. The backlash was so swift that Warner reversed course by saying the film was now for sale — only to set the price at an exorbitant $75 to $80 million. For more than a year the film sat on the shelf, where it looked like it would remain, until it was reported in March 2025 that Ketchup Entertainment, which had previously bought and released 2024’s The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, had purchased Coyote vs. ACME for $50 million.
Finally, Coyote vs. ACME is coming to theaters on August 28, and I am excited to say, as a lifelong Looney Tunes fan who has been very invested in this whole drama, it was entirely worth the wait.
As Bauza told Polygon back in January, Coyote vs. ACME is half legal drama, half buddy comedy. The main story sees Wile E. Coyote bring a lawsuit against the ACME corporation for all of it's products that have backfired on him, and he turns to an unambitious small-claims lawyer Kevin Avery (Forte) to help. While Avery wants to settle for a small fee, which is what he usually does with these kinds of cases, the Coyote’s drive inspires him to pursue the lawsuit unlike any case he has before. And much like Eddie Valiant befriends a toon rabbit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (an obvious inspiration for this film), Avery becomes a dear friend of the lonely coyote.
The first thing to love about Coyote vs. ACME is that it's funny — like, really funny. The jokes in the film vary from big physical gags, background jokes, sharply-written one-liners, and Easter eggs for Looney Tunes fans. They also come at a rapid-fire pace that would best be compared to Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker comedies like Airplane and The Naked Gun. And if every single gag doesn’t land, it’s okay because another one is coming right around the corner.
To offer a few examples, the film opens with what is essentially a brand-new Coyote and Road Runner short that is a mix of new and classic gags that blend together seamlessly. There are also wall-to-wall background gags delivered by Looney Tunes deep-cut characters that populate this world of both humans and toons. As for one-liners, there’s a particularly funny exchange with Granny, whose husband has gone missing. In a conversation with Avery, she says, “Some people say he ran off with his secretary, but I don’t think so. His secretary was a penguin.”
Looney Tunes die-hards will especially appreciate the Easter eggs in the film. For example, the name of the main law firm in the film is Avery, Jones and Maltese, named for Looney Tunes legends Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese.
The movie also has a big reveal halfway through that is shocking, laugh-out-loud hilarious, and completely true to the Looney Tunes.
The movie's choice of reality is an interesting one and different from the likes of Space Jam and even Who Framed Roger Rabbit. In Coyote vs. ACME, the world is simply populated by both humans and cartoon characters, and it’s treated completely normally (sort of like a Muppet film, where certain roles are cast with humans and others are cast by Muppets, depending upon what best suits the role). The Looney Tunes characters are also not famous in this reality. When Avery meets Bugs Bunny, he’s not saying, “I watched you when I was a kid,” like Michael Jordan did in Space Jam. Bugs is just a cartoon rabbit who plays a small, but integral part in the case.
This reality is brought to life using live-action film with 3D-rendered cartoon characters on top, though they are meant to look 2D given their flat colors and purposeful lack of depth. If I have one complaint about this movie, it's that it would have been really cool to use real, 2D hand-drawn animation like in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. That said, I’m fully aware this would have made Coyote vs. ACME prohibitively expensive and that most of the people who did that kind of thing the old-fashioned way are now dead. So, 3D acting as 2D is a compromise I can live with, especially since the characters all squash and stretch the way they’re supposed to. And honestly, outside of animation nerds, a lot of people may not be able to tell the difference anyway. ‘
For lack of a better way to describe it, the “casting” of the Looney Tunes characters in this film is also top-notch, which is why it's the best-ever feature film starring the Looney Tunes. It was as though the story were constructed like any other screenplay, then the Looney Tunes were cast according to their personality. While the Coyote and the Road Runner obviously have the biggest toon parts in the film, the blowhard boss of the ACME corporation is perfectly played by Foghorn Leghorn, and Tweety Bird, who was technically a villain in the classic shorts where he antagonized Sylvester the Cat, is one of ACME’s enforcers. The best casting though goes to Elmer Fudd just because of how true-to-life it is, but I won’t ruin the joke here.