‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: Thank Goodness This Clever Comedy About the Evils of Corporate Greed Was Rescued from Corporate Hell
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- Ketchup Entertainment is releasing "Coyote vs. Acme" in theaters on Friday, August 28, after the live-action/animated Looney Tunes hybrid was shelved by Warner Bros. for a tax write-off in a saga the reviewer calls "years-long mishegoss."
- Dave Green directs the film, in which Wile E. Coyote sues Acme Corporation over defective products — a premise the reviewer notes is uncomfortably close to the film's own backstory of being dumped by deep-pocketed studio accountants who "don't care about actual quality so much as lots of money."
- Will Forte stars as ambulance-chasing Albuquerque lawyer Kevin Avery, joined by Lana Condor as his niece Paige and John Cena as Acme's lead attorney Buddy Crane; Forte's character communicates with a non-speaking Coyote via sign and facial expression.
- Samy Burch wrote the screenplay with story credits to James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, drawing partly on a satirical 1990 New Yorker article; the film blends live action with classic Looney Tunes characters (Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn) and uses puppeteer Dave Barclay in special Coyote costumes.
- The review praises the film's first hour as "zippy" and "snappy" but flags that the third act gets "muddled" when Dr. Peter Lorre's 1992-set subplot intersects with the present-day lawsuit, and notes that the world's rules — how humans and 'toons coexist — are never explained.
- Warner Bros. never publicly explained why it shelved a completed film, and the reviewer's irony cuts deeper: the studio's own book-cooking brass didn't anticipate that a movie about corporate greed weaponizing financial logic would draw "awkward comparisons" to its own treatment of the project.
- The film opens August 28 theatrically, positioned by the reviewer not just as recovered intellectual property but as proof that Hollywood's "wacky war on original ideas" can still be won — with Ketchup Entertainment emerging as the unlikely savior where a major studio declined.
- Cross-coverage consensus: headlines frame this primarily as a Warner Bros. / tax-shelter story, but the review's sharper angle is the meta-irony — a studio punished a film whose own plot satirizes exactly that punishment, a layer visible only in the full review.
Why it matters: Warner Bros.' decision to shelve a completed, family-friendly hybrid for a tax write-off cost the studio any theatrical upside and instead handed distributor Ketchup Entertainment a ready-made marketing hook: a scrappy indie swooping in to rescue a project the conglomerate deemed worthless. For audiences, the release date of August 28 finally delivers a film that has spent years in limbo, while for Hollywood labor, the case is now a frequently-cited example of how studios treat pre-tax-asset movies as balance-sheet entries rather than finished creative work.
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