REGINA, Sask. — Today, I will turn my focus away from all the rest of the depressing news you read about on this site and focus instead on something much more uplifting.
I am talking, of course, about the feel-good story of the summer: Coyote vs. Acme.
For a long time, though, this movie was emblematic of all the things that movie fans hated about Hollywood. It was a massive struggle for this movie to even see the light of day, even though the die-hard fans of Looney Tunes out there were clamouring for its release.
But it's about more than just that. It's about the general feeling that the Looney Tunes have been hard done by in general by Warner Bros., which has repeatedly shown little interest in promoting these iconic characters.
It used to be that the Looney Tunes were EVERYWHERE. I remember growing up and watching the Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show on Saturday mornings, where the classic cartoons would be replayed over and over again. And they weren't just there; they were also in prime-time specials throughout the year, and later cable TV got into the act to show the Looney Tunes every day. And then in the 1990s came the commercials with Michael Jordan, leading to the movie Space Jam!
Up until the 2000s, characters like Bugs, Daffy Duck, Sylvester and Tweety, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Speedy Gonzales and Pepe Le Pew were everywhere. And then — they just started to disappear.
That is the backdrop to this Coyote vs. Acme fiasco that played out. The general feeling from the Looney Tunes fans is that Warner Bros. has done a shoddy job of protecting and promoting characters who ought to be a big gold mine for them. These characters have become harder and harder to find over the years, with TV shows getting cancelled and movies flopping (i.e., Space Jam 2), and it reached a low point when the classic cartoons were removed completely from HBO Max.
But then it hit a new low point when Warner Bros. decided to put the fully completed Coyote vs. Acme movie on the shelf. It was shelved in 2023 for a $30-million tax writeoff.
For the fans, this was the final humiliation — the final slap in the face. Among other things, this Coyote vs. Acme movie actually sounded good. It was based on a piece that ran in The New Yorker about how Wile E. Coyote sued the evil Acme Corporation over its line of products that keep malfunctioning whenever he tries to catch or blow up the Road Runner. The Coyote would forever get maimed, injured, blown up, crushed by a boulder or hurled off a cliff, thanks to these defective products. A movie where this maltreated Coyote goes to court and finally faces down the Acme Corporation for all their misdeeds sounded like great drama and a load of laughs.
Instead, WB put it on the shelf. That brought out all the usual trashing online of Warner Bros. head David Zaslav and how he's running the studio into the ground. And now the WB studio is locked in a takeover battle, with Paramount facing all kinds of antitrust opposition to the takeover, this coming after WB's deal to sell to Netflix went down the tubes.
Anyway, the good news is all the opposition and howling from the fans paid off. Ketchup Entertainment rescued the film, purchasing it from WB for $50 million. And it finally got its release, with an advertising campaign claiming that this was "the movie the Acme Corporation didn't want you to see."
This was too close to the truth for Looney Tunes fans, because this was "the movie the WB didn't want you to see."
So the question is: was the WB studio right to put this on the shelf? Was this movie really that bad?
It turns out — no. In fact, the movie is really, really good. The Looney Tunes fans on the X platform are all loving it.
This movie really does take you back to all of the Looney Tunes cartoons you grew up watching — or perhaps missed out on thanks to current WB management incompetence. In fact, this movie is a cross between the Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Show and Better Call Saul!
The setting is Albuquerque, New Mexico, a community of particular significance to WB cartoon fans because Bugs Bunny would always fail to take that "left turn at Albuquerque." But the setting is right in the American Southwest, home of the Road Runner and Coyote.
And yes, it is about how the little guy Coyote fights the big bad corporation that doesn't care about the consumers, but what surprised me was the twists and turns this movie took. The plot is not the standard "Coyote takes Acme to court and wins a massive settlement" storyline. Among other things, this Acme Corporation truly is evil — using cartoon characters as pawns to test out their lousy, defective products. Their whole leadership belongs in jail.
The movie does have human stars like Will Forte as Coyote's lawyer, and he learns a few lessons from the Coyote about how not to settle and never to give up in the face of adversity. John Cena plays the opposing lawyer for Acme. But the real stars are the Looney Tunes characters and particularly Wile E. Coyote.
This movie also has all the Looney Tunes gags we have come to expect, with cameos from the likes of Bugs, Granny, Tweety Bird, Daffy in an insane asylum (appropriately) and even Pepe Le Pew, in which the annoying skunk finally gets his comeuppance. It also features Foghorn Leghorn as the head of Acme Corporation, who is accurately described in the movie as a "blowhard."
And it has the Road Runner. As you will see in this movie, during the scene in which the Road Runner testifies against Acme, it turns out the Coyote and the Road Runner actually do care about one another after all. It makes you want to cry, almost.
Anyway, I write a lot here in this column about movie box-office winners and losers, but sometimes it's not the winning or losing or final numbers that count. Sometimes what matters is simply that a movie gets made and gets distributed at all.
For the beleaguered fans of Looney Tunes, just the fact that Coyote vs. Acme made it to the big screen is a win. That's the real story of all of this. The movie fans finally won, for a change, and got to see the movie they demanded to see. It almost restores your faith in Hollywood — that things will work out in the end and the cream will eventually rise to the top.
Looney Tunes fans might hope that the good word of mouth will lead to lots of success for this movie, and perhaps even more projects for the franchise. Perhaps we might see that talked-about Bugs Bunny musical Bye Bye Bunny. Perhaps we might see more TV shows or more distribution of the classic cartoons we grew up watching.
One can only hope.
