You Can’t Keep a Good Coyote Down
- 4 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Laurence Lerman / New York City
Fittingly, there may be no more indestructible movie arriving in theaters this summer than Coyote vs. Acme. After all, its hero is Wile E. Coyote, a creature who has spent the better part of a century being flattened by boulders, launched from cliffs, blown up by dynamite and betrayed by every product he has ever ordered from the Acme Corporation—only to dust himself off and try, try again.
The movie bearing his name has proved as difficult to kill.
Completed several years ago, Dave Green’s live action/animated comedy was notoriously shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery in 2023, which planned to use the unreleased film as a tax write-off. The decision prompted an extraordinary public backlash, particularly because reports from test screenings suggested that the movie was actually good. Warner eventually allowed the filmmakers to shop it elsewhere, and Ketchup Entertainment, which acquired the film, finally released it theatrically this weekend. Its triumphant arrival is certain to vindicate those who fought to save it.
Having seen the movie, I can report that Coyote vs. Acme is indeed a lot of fun—and importantly, it feels like one made by people who genuinely know and love the anarchic universe of Looney Tunes.
Its origins are unusually literary. The premise comes from Ian Frazier’s satirical 1990 piece for The New Yorker, written in the form of a solemn legal brief detailing Wile E. Coyote’s product-liability suit against Acme for the catastrophic malfunction of its merchandise. The joke was irresistible: what if someone finally held Acme legally responsible for all those defective rocket skates, giant magnets and packages of explosives?
The movie runs with the conceit without becoming a feature-length exercise in legal satire. Wile E. hires Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a down-on-his-luck personal-injury lawyer reduced to advertising himself on billboards. Lana Condor plays Kevin’s bright-eyed niece and legal intern Paige, while John Crena has enormous fun as Buddy Crane, Kevin’s former boss and the spectacularly smug corporate attorney representing Acme. Cena, increasingly adept at weaponizing his action-hero physique for comedy, is frequently hysterical.
The legal battle also provides an excuse to open the Warner cartoon vault. Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Tweety, the Tasmanian Devil and others turn up in supporting roles and cameos, without the movie feeling like a feature-length corporate roll call. Best of all may be Foghorn Leghorn, pressed into service as a key witness for Acme. The film understands that much of the pleasure lies simply in seeing these characters behaving like themselves.
That affection for Looney Tunes history extends to the filmmaking. Green and company combine live action and animation with considerable confidence, and while nobody is likely to dethrone Who Framed Roger Rabbit? —still the gold standard nearly four decades later—Coyote vs. Acme occasionally approaches its predecessor’s marvelous sense that humans and cartoons genuinely occupy the same physical universe. The slapstick has weight, the animated characters interact convincingly with their surroundings, and the filmmakers haven't tried to sand away the gleeful lunacy that made the original cartoons immortal.
The picture isn't flawless. There are dry stretches, and the screenplay could stand some tightening; not every human subplot is as funny as the Coyote-versus-corporation material. But at 101 minutes, the movie moves briskly enough that its weaker passages don't linger. More importantly, it works as something increasingly difficult to find: a family movie that doesn't feel as though it was assembled by committee after studying demographic charts. Kids can enjoy the explosions and cartoon mayhem while adults get the corporate jokes, legal absurdities and nearly a century's worth of Looney Tunes history tucked around the edges.
Which inevitably brings us back to Warner Bros. Coyote vs. Acme creates a question that may be impossible to avoid: Why on earth did anyone think this movie should never be seen?
The film’s near-destruction will probably remain permanently attached to its reputation. The irony is almost too delicious: a movie about a battered little guy suing an enormous, indifferent corporation was itself nearly obliterated by an enormous corporation for financial reasons. The Coyote couldn't have devised a better gag involving an anvil.
But now the movie finally gets its audience—and perhaps the nicest surprise is that there's actually a movie worth celebrating beneath all that Hollywood infamy. Coyote vs. Acme isn't a lost masterpiece, nor does it need to be. It's funny, affectionate, inventive and refreshingly devoted to the characters that inspired it. In the dog days of August, there are plenty of worse ways to spend a couple of hours in a cool, dark theater.
And after everything Wile E. Coyote has survived, it's awfully satisfying to see him get a shot at finally winning one.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist and a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.
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