Coyote vs. Acme Is Finally, Actually, in Theaters. It Wasn’t Easy.

5 min readFor a year and a half, Coyote vs. Acme director Dave Green watched everyone stick up for the little guy. (Let us agree that a $70 million comedy is a “little guy” for a moment.) After wrapping production of his new Looney Tunes movie, it was shelved in November 2023 by Warner Bros. Like another unreleased Warner movie before it, Batgirl, Coyote vs. Acme was canned for a $30 million tax write-off. It was never meant to see the light of day.Now, people are finally seeing it. And they’re loving it. On August 28, Coyote vs. Acme escaped Warner’s confines to open in theaters, released by Ketchup Entertainment. It boasts an anvil-to-the-head 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, and placed second at the North American box office with a $15.9 million gross in its opening weekend. But even if Coyote vs. Acme made no money, it would still be a winner.Green knows his film’s release is nothing short of a miracle. But how it was made, on a craft level, is its own miracle, too.“There’s irony in this, because the movie is about a little guy fighting a corporation. This is what our movie has become,” he tells us. “We feel tremendously lucky to be at this moment. I’m relieved and thrilled, and grateful to the audience who stood up for us.”That included filmmakers who’ve been in Green’s shoes. He tells me that after the movie was shelved, he met Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, the directors of the DC Comics movie Batgirl, which Warner Bros. also locked away for a tax write-off.“They were amazing,” Green says. “We had a meal and shared stories. They gave me advice about how to navigate things. It was great to have them as allies. I’m inspired by how prolific those guys are. They just got up and made another hit movie right away.”In Coyote vs. Acme, Wile E. Coyote has finally had it with the Acme Corporation and its mountain of faulty gizmos. After decades wasted and who knows how much money spent, he still craves a bite of the elusive Road Runner. So Coyote turns to a small-time lawyer, Kevin Avery (played by Will Forte), to sue the company. Together, they unearth a conspiracy involving the exploitation of innocent cartoons under those whose own hunger for greed exceeds the Coyote’s empty belly.The movie is adapted from Ian Frazier’s satirical 1990 article for The New Yorker, “Coyote V. Acme,” which intentionally reads like a dry report of the lawsuit. Still, creating a film around a sly and silent cartoon character who lights up dynamite sticks around human actors—including Will Forte, Lana Condor, and John Cena (who plays Acme’s shark-like attorney Buddy Crane)—was anything but a gag.“He is an eternal optimist,” Green says about Coyote. “This is a character who wakes up every day and expects to eat Road Runner stew that night. The next day, he does the same thing. That resilience and persistence are his defining characteristics. And he is the greatest physical comedian. He is Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin combined. Everything he does is laugh-out-loud funny.”Like Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Cool World, and both Space Jams before it, Coyote vs. Acme is a half-animated, half-live action movie that required meticulous preparation to shoot around an imaginary protagonist. Like Coyote himself, Green had to plan, plan, plan to the most minute detail. This included a year dedicated just to logistics and storyboarding the film, he says.“We spent the bulk of 2020 with screenwriter Sammy Birch. She worked on a draft that everyone became really happy with by the end of that year. Then 2021, we spent making the animatic—basically a 90-minute cut you could watch. It was a creative exercise that helped us figure out Wile E. Coyote, what he would do in every scene.”They also fielded advice from producer Chris DeFaria. “When we began, he said, ‘Wile E. Coyote is never going to show up on set,’” Green recalls. Pre-production was the time for the filmmakers to workshop everything and “talk” to Wile “through the storyboard artists and animators who speak on his behalf.” The way Green puts it, it was like a jam session without instruments.Ketchup EntertainmentCoyote vs. Acme, which was rescued from Warner Bros., is a new hybrid comedy about Wile E. Coyote suing the daylights out of the Acme Corporation.“We would look at a script page. We know we’re going from A to B. But the details of how Wile would get to his goals were flexible, and the artists would come to me with ideas. ‘What if Wile E.’s doing this?’ To make it feel like Wile was a living, breathing character.”The filmmakers of Coyote vs. Acme endured plenty of the hurdles faced on Roger Rabbit and Space Jam. But the tools have been modernized. “Roger doesn’t exist, Wile doesn’t exist. They are also small enough and limber enough that they can’t be played by humans,” explains Green. “That puts you into a situation where you have to have a puppet, a proxy for the actors to interact and look at,” Green says.He adds, “Honestly, there is no movie if you don’t buy the magic trick that is Will [Forte] actually looking across Wile. E Coyote.”It was also never an option for Wile E. to be anything other than a true Looney Tune. He had to be a cartoon, not a hyperrealistic puppet of CGI pixels like Gollum. That decision seems obvious, and it was, but it was “driven by story,” says Green.“Acme makes products for humans and cartoons. But the cartoons are not satisfied with the products Acme makes for them. They are dangerous and pretty experimental. It’s built into the story, that discrepancy between the human world and the cartoon world which helped us define the look of the characters in the film. It was important to me that an animated character look animated.”Adds Green, “Our intent was not to have Wile E. where you’d think he was a real-life coyote wandered from the desert. It was important the ‘cartoonhood’ of these characters was worn on their faces. 2D characters are so expressive and fun to watch, and so bendable. They have so much personality.”From its exile into a Warner Bros. storage unit to opening in theaters, the story behind Coyote vs. Acme is almost as inspiring as its own story of underdog persistence. For Green, the year and a half of people banging on the drums to see his movie has been nothing short of rewarding.“So much of the audience spoke up for us and defended us, and had interest in these characters,” he tells me. “If there's any lesson in this entire thing, it's that you have to stay persistent. You have to keep trying. You keep making things. There really there really is no other way.”