MOVIES: Coyote vs. Acme (2026, Dave Green)
Coyote vs. Acme first made news in 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they were going to shelve the finished film and take a tax writeoff instead of releasing it. There was great backlash, especially because the few people who'd seen the movie said it was good, and WBD eventually agreed to let the movie be released. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights; the movie's now in theaters; and whaddya know? It really is good.
It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.
(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)
That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").
The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.
All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.
Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.
The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.
I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.
It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.
(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)
That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").
The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.
All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.
Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.
The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.
I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.
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