If you’re still not convinced that creativity and originality are under siege, particularly in the movie business, look no further than the tangled tale of how the wholly joyous Coyote vs. Acme very nearly didn’t make it to a theater near you. As of summer 2018, the picture—a blend of animation and live action, adapted from a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier inspired by the forever-enduring Looney Tunes shorts—was already in development. In the spring of 2022, live-action filming took place in New Mexico. In November 2023, seeking a tax write-off, Warner Bros. Discovery decided to shelve the film; the company eventually agreed to allow the filmmakers to look for another distributor. After numerous false starts, Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights to Coyote vs. Acme, which is why you’re now able to see the film in theaters, and eventually via streaming. In a world where entertainment conglomerates are clearly focused only on profits, this seems like a small miracle, which is why you should run—Beep beep!—not walk to see this late-summer delight on the big screen.
The premise is simple yet ingenious: After years of being zonked out by iron wrecking balls, of having slingshots overshoot the mark not by feet but by miles, of having dynamite blow his face off, Wile E. Coyote, a longtime consumer of ACME products, has decided to sue the company that has caused him so much misery. He has used all that ACME stuff for one purpose only: to ensnare the object of his eternal salivation, the tufted blue-and-yellow speed demon known as the Road Runner, both uncatchable and unknowable. But now, it seems, enough is enough, and maybe ACME is the problem. Wile E. enlists the help of a law firm specializing in personal injury cases (it’s called Avery, Jones & Maltese, a nod to three of the Looney Tunes’ chief architects, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese), and it's headed by Kevin Avery (Will Forte), whose specialty is getting settlements of a hundred bucks here or there from cartoon characters who have had limbs and such blown off—temporarily, thank god—by faulty products.
Forte as Wile E.'s lawyer Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment
Coyote vs. Acme is set in a world where cartoons and humans coexist without batting an eye, so it’s business as usual when Wile E. shows up at Avery’s Albuquerque headquarters. Avery is pretty sure he can get his client a few hundred smackers for the defective rocket-powered roller skates our coyote friend has hauled in as Exhibit A. But then Wile E. unfurls, magically, a bundle including every single ACME product that has ever clocked his noggin or blasted him to oblivion: these million and one instruments of pain and suffering spring high into the sky, like magic rocks gone wild. Avery is still reluctant to sue the pants off ACME. But his niece and intern Paige (Lana Condor) persuades him this is one case that could really make a difference for thousands of disadvantaged cartoon characters, many of whom, including Porky Pig, Daffy, and Tweety Bird, show up in sprightly cameos. That’s how Avery finds himself up against ACME’s bulldog lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena, who, with his square, precise jaw and squinty smirk, looks like a work of vintage hand-drawn animation himself). He also learns that Wile E.’s case isn’t isolated: ACME has long been involved in a nefarious plot to make millions by taking advantage of hapless cartoon characters.
Coyote vs. Acme was directed by Dave Green, whose highest-profile movie to date may have been 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. But his confidence sings here: to say Coyote vs. Acme benefits from a light touch may seem odd—this is, after all, a movie where heads are clonked with mallets and facial features are rearranged by malfunctioning explosives. But the spirit of Coyote vs. Acme is everything. The script was written by Samy Burch, James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater; the voices of most of the characters—including Bugs Bunny, as a trenchcoat-wearing informant, and Elmer Fudd, as an earnest senator in charge of questioning “Mr. Runner” during a hearing—are provided by voice actor Eric Bauza, who clearly aced his studies at the University of Mel Blanc. Forte makes a fabulous foil for his cartoon costars: he never tries to outdo them, preferring to bow to their lunatic majesty. He knows they’re what we’ve come here for.
John Cena and Tweety Bird Courtesy of Ketchup Entertainment
Because the Road Runner cartoons—which, along with the other works of genius in the Looney Tunes galaxy, made many of us the warped individuals we are today—were never really about the Road Runner. He’s moving too fast for us to ever get a handle on him; his job is to outsmart the coyote who hopes to catch him and turn him into stew, and he’s simply too good at that job. We know he’s always going to win, which makes him less interesting than his nemesis. Wile E. Coyote, with his conniving yellow eyes, a voiceless beast who communicates by holding up a series of signs scrawled with simple lines of dialogue, is the character we love in spite of ourselves. His untrustworthiness is his greatest quality; when he pretends to be nice, his canine lips turning up in a facsimile of a canine smile, we know it’s an act, and we can wear the joy of not being taken in by his deceptions as a badge of honor. It’s both funny and a little horrible when he goes splat into a slab of rocky desert clay, cutting a Wile E.-shaped hole into nature’s landscape. In Coyote vs. Acme, we almost feel something for him—almost. But in the end, he lets us off the hook; he will not let us fall victim to sentimentality. We're in on his con, and it's a pleasurable place to be.
Coyote vs. Acme is all about the little guys fighting, and winning against, a corporate behemoth. Could it be that Chuck Jones and his cohorts, by inventing a do-it-all, know-it-all company that could fulfill our every material desire, dropping off packages almost before we’d even placed an order, had in some cracked way foreseen the rise of Amazon? They probably couldn’t have imagined it, and it’s just as well, because the world they dreamed up—one of slapstick escape, of kerpow explosions that never did any actual harm, of faces and voices that we can summon in our memories as easily as those of our loved ones—is better than anything money can buy. In Coyote vs. Acme, the little guy wins, and we do too. Instead of being handed, in movie form, an exploding cigar that someone else thinks we want, we get the thing we didn’t know we wanted: a movie about a coyote, a bird, and a lawsuit, one that both speaks to our time and allows us, for the space of an hour or two, to escape it.
