Review: COYOTE VS. ACME

 by JB

This is such a special film.

One of the happiest pieces of film-related news this year was the announcement that Ketchup Entertainment had bought the film Coyote vs. Acme from Warner Bros. and was going to give it a proper release in theaters. This followed Ketchup’s great success rescuing The Day the Earth Blew Up from streaming obscurity in 2024. The latest Looney Tunes feature film opens in honest-to-goodness theaters today. Don’t miss it.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: After years of purchasing ACME products and having these wildly defective gee-gaws malfunction, causing him grave injury, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue the company for damages. He hires “billboard law firm” Avery, Jones, and Maltese to plead his case in court. Kevin Avery (Will Forte) would rather settle the case quickly for a quick payout. He hasn’t been in a courtroom in years. ACME also would rather settle quickly and quietly. What is ACME hiding?

Based on a very funny New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier that was later published as a book, Coyote vs. Acme starts with a strong premise. It is not merely an extended Road Runner cartoon, though it contains many gags based on the Coyote’s crazy obsession with making that zooming bird his dinner. Screenwriter Samy Burch does a great job handling a potential story problem: how to make the scheming and single-minded Coyote a sympathetic protagonist? Kudos also for working out how to center a feature film on a main character who never speaks.

As the new film reminds us, some of the sight gags in the original Chuck Jones shorts were worthy of Buster Keaton—if Keaton operated in a universe where gravity could be paused for the sake of a joke. I've always loved how these cartoons played with physics, motion, perspective, spatial relationships, and utter silliness.

One of my favorite jokes in the film is Forte’s TV lawyer pitch. (These types of commercials are ubiquitous where I live in California, where fender benders are apparently big business.) “Have you ever set a big stack of TNT on the road, hoping to blow up your nemesis, but the detonator itself explodes? Have you ever pulled the ripcord of your parachute, and only a bunch of silverware comes out? IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

How ironic that this cartoon tale of corporate malfeasance would become a metaphor for itself when mega-corporation Warner Bros. refused to release it, choosing to write it off as a loss rather than, you know, MAKING PEOPLE HAPPY WITH A FUN MOVIE.

The current owners of Warner Bros. have proven themselves to be inadequate cultural stewards by taking this special little Valentine to the studio’s rich cartoon history and shelving it indefinitely... for A TAX WRITE-OFF. Assholes. Clowns. Criminals.

After Ketchup Entertainment bought the rights to the finished film, they began running trailers for Coyote Vs. Acme... on April 15th, Tax Day. The teaser featured Wile E. Coyote hanging in the air before holding up a sign reading "Happy Tax Day" on one side and "Check Your Write-Offs" on the other, then falling to his doom.

The film's marketing geniuses leaned into the tax write-off controversy, using ACME Corporation as a placeholder for Warner Bros., such as with the slogan "The Movie ACME Doesn't Want You to See.” The trailer was watched 25.6 million times within its first 24 hours, which set the record for most views for an independent family film. Take that, you soulless bureaucrats!

I feel that owning a film studio or a film library means something more than owning a fucking factory that churns out baked beans. Carl Laemmle understood that. So did Jack Warner. So did Louis B. Mayer. So did Walt Disney. The short sightedness of the current crop of studio heads is depressing. I may never stop throwing up. As Mr. Bernstein says in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, “There’s no trick to making a lot of money... if all you want is to make a lot of money."

As this YouTube video, “How Warner Bros. Killed a $17 Billion Cartoon Empire” from just last month explains by laying out the history of the studio for the last 35 years, Warner Bros. has criminally mismanaged this asset since the first Space Jam. Cartoon Brew, quoted in the piece, put it succinctly: “Warner Brothers Discovery CEO David Zaslaz is continuing his systematic crusade to dismantle WB’s animation legacy and he’s doing it with the kind of thoroughness that borders on obsession.”

Much like 2024’s The Day the Earth Blew Up, Coyote vs. Acme has everything a Looney Tunes fan would desire in a modern version of the classic cartoons. The characters all stay true to form, there is an abundance of inspired sight gags, and there are scads of cameos from Looney Tunes characters both famous and obscure. I don’t want to spoil the joy of recognition, but I have a special feeling for any film that features shout-outs to Peter Lorre, Yosemite Sam, and Yertle the Turtle.

This weekend, or in the days ahead, let’s all plan to see this special little film in a theater. This will be the equivalent of buying boxes and boxes of TNT from a company OTHER THAN ACME and shoving them up Warner Bros.’ collective keister. And when we put down our money at the box office, nothing will go wrong with the Detonator of Taste and Discretion and Comeuppance... We will teach the Brothers Warner a lesson about the importance of our cartoon heritage... and things blowing up REAL good.

Especially the comically-labeled sticks of metaphoric TNT stuffed inside their capacious, metaphoric assholes.

Boom!