Coyote vs Acme Review

(This review contains spoilers. It is up to you not to read the spoilers.)

I expected to enjoy Coyote vs ACME. I didn’t expect to leave the theatre a crying mess.

I promised myself once it was announced that Ketchup Entertainment had acquired the rights to the film that David Zaslav of Warner Bros. Discovery tried to simply shelve and never show that I would see the movie and support it. I felt it was important to show up for something like this to say that you shouldn’t be just locking a movie in a vault.

It’s all crazy to me as an elder millennial who watched Animaniacs, a show where the premise was the Warner Bros. (and Warner Sister) were so crazy with their old black and white cartoons that the Warner Bros. company decided to lock up all of their movies (and the kids themselves) never to be released. They eventually find their way out of the tower and wreck havoc. Here this was happening in reality. Well, you know what I mean. We’re the Animaniacs this time.

So this weekend I went for a Sunday matinée. I already knew there were positive reviews but I wondered how much of that were from people who like me knew they were going to support the film no matter what. The theatre wasn’t full but it had an interesting mix of elderly people with what looked like their grandkids.

There was a really odd backlash to the movie I saw brewing where people were mocking how it did on its opening night. I don’t know if that’s just a weird internet thing now or not but nobody was saying the movie needs to get out of the vault by WBD and not be a tax writeoff because it will make two billion at the box office. We just wanted to see what looked like a good movie.

I don’t want to get sidetracked, but this obsession over box office numbers is so stupid to me. Yes, I want the things I enjoy to keep getting made, but I really don’t care if the things I like are popular or not. Probably 2/3rds of the films I love the most were box office failures. Fight Club, Almost Famous, Blade Runner, Big Trouble in Little China, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, none of these films were successful in theatre. Do people seriously base their enjoyment on whether or not a movie was watched by a lot of others? Sigh, yes, I know the answer.

Anyway, the film.

Anyone can look it up so I won’t pad this review getting completely into it but if you’ve watched Wile E. Coyote try to catch The Roadrunner, he always uses Acme products. This movie is him suing the Acme Corporation because the products have failed for like 50 years at allowing him to catch the Roadrunner. The problem is that Acme is essentially a mega corporation at this point. It’s not just cartoon anvils and dynamite they make. Every phone has the Acme logo on it. Every computer. Probably the best comparable would be if Apple combined with General Electric.

They are so prevalent even the law office going up against them never thinks twice about the fact they are using phones and computers made by Acme while going up against them. It’s only when Granny breaks the phone of senior partner Kevin Avery’s niece Paige that it gets brought up. I was kind of disappointed we didn’t get a scene of them having to replace all of their equipment, especially after they showed Granny’s answering machine and it was a classic General Electric. Paige does switch to paper and a pen but Kevin is still using a laptop right to the senate hearing.

The film does a good job following the beats of a classic John Grisham lawyer movie from the 1990s. It isn’t just the case of Wile E. Coyote having faulty equipment. It turns out they are basically animals having the products tested on them so Acme can later create products safe for human consumption. One doesn’t have to think too hard on how this giant corporation doing this to Looney Tunes mades you think about how major corporations are essentially using people as test subjects on their apps and programs. You know, like generative AI and… oh just read my last rant.

It turns out Acme abuses cartoons because “they can take it”, essentially because they can’t die. So yes, Acme products were intentionally bad so Wile E. Coyote could use them over and over and fail. Funny enough, we later find out that even if Acme was using good products they couldn’t stop the Roadrunner, as they thought they had Roadrunner glued to the ground to drop an anvil and silence them MEEP MEEP’s but Roadrunner easily got away.

But all that said, the real crux of the film, the message, was about failure and struggle. Kevin Avery felt like a failure and constantly settled all of his cartoon injury cases with Acme because it was the closest he could feel to winning. He had no hope and saw himself as pathetic, and was fine being a bottom feeding lawyer so long as he never had to strive for anything bigger. Wile E. Coyote meanwhile refuses to quit on the pursuit of Roadrunner, a pursuit that while Coyote sees it as trying to eat Roadrunner, Roadrunner sees Wile E. as a friend. That revelation really got the water works out of me.

In the end they don’t win their case in court. It gets dismissed by the judge. They also don’t win in front of the senate. Elmer Fudd, a villain in the Looney Tunes world, is the central senator and didn’t see a case with Wile E. Coyote being the only plaintiff. Acme wins despite their best efforts. In the end, there is justice when Project Sisyphus (the secret project that was hurting the cartoons for information) leaks out. This felt a bit tacked on. We already got the soul of the film at this point.

We didn’t need to see Foghorn Leghorn go to jail to feel good. We got to feel good seeing that these were people who found purpose regardless of the failures and regardless of how hard their task was. Like Sisyphus and the stone, they didn’t stop trying to bring it up the hill because it was impossible. They did it because it was the right thing to do.

And that reminded me of all the ways I’ve left a lot of things in my life undone, incomplete, and undiscovered. Because they were hard. Because it was easier to just take the safe route. The route with less struggle. Less struggle hasn’t made my life better. No different to Kevin, who was a Harvard lawyer just like John Cena’s Buddy Crane, but feels like a failure every time he’s around him. It’s a joke to everyone they used to be in a class together, not because Buddy Crane is handsome and strong, but because Kevin accepted defeat before he could even try to win.

So that really hit home for me. Same with Roadrunner asking Wile E. when he was coming home. Dr. Peter Lorre once again playing the piano for Granny got to me too.

But enough about the crying. Is it funny? Yes! The movie has so many great jokes. Even better it’s not the, “well that happened” type joke that’s so prevalent these days. These were real jokes, punchlines, timing, clever, all over the place. There’s a ton of Looney Tunes lore and references and call backs, so knowing your Looney Tunes helps but isn’t necessary. Just the quick scene with Pepe LePew is the type of thing that everyone can enjoy.

Coyote vs Acme is a fantastic movie. If Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was a complimentary piece to Chinatown, this is a complimentary piece to The Insider. Okay no it’s John Grisham 90s law movies. I only say The Insider because Bruce McGill is basically a living Foghorn Leghorn in The Insider but on the good side.

My scattered observations:

– Bugs Bunny basically being an agent of chaos, hiding in the shadows and leading the lawfirm to the answers of the Sisyphus experiments, is he having to hide because Elmer Fudd is now a senator? He comments to blame everything on Elmer if someone asks.

– The hotel clerk who thought Wile E. Coyote was a pet, is she not experienced with selling rooms to cartoons? It seems everyone else is fine with this mixed world of human and cartoons except her. Or she was just giving Kevin a hard time because Coyote did get a room eventually.

– Was Acme spying on the lawfirm through their computers and cell phones?

– Someone asked what should the next Looney Tunes movie be and this was my response:

Duck Dodgers but it’s Dune https://t.co/UdKyz8S2AC

— Aaron Wrotkowski (@AaronWrotkowski) August 31, 2026

So now I guess we have to wonder, what’s the future for these kind of movies? Space Jam 2 was a giant failure, though the pandemic didn’t help. This movie made $15 million opening weekend and we will have to see if it has the legs to break even, but even if it doesn’t, it still end up the biggest success by Ketchup Entertainment. The problem is they don’t own the rights. WBD does. And WBD might soon become Paramount Skydance unless the merger dies.

So regardless of whether or not it does die, does Warner Bros try to do one of these types of movies anytime soon? Or do they write it off as something that just doesn’t work anymore. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Space Jam are major successes from 30 years ago. Everything tried since just hasn’t hit on the mixed animation and live action. There was also some criticism on the CGI animation though it didn’t bother me. Of course I’d prefer hand drawn.

It makes me hope that the film is ultimately enough of a success that Warner Animation decides to try again, and maybe finds a way to ensure it ends up a movie they don’t try to shelf for tax purposes. Otherwise, much like this one? You’re gonna make us Animaniacs give you bad PR at a time you really don’t need it. Again.

Let’s not do this game of Roadrunner Coyote again, kay WBD?