It's Finally Here: Watch the 'Coyote vs. ACME' Trailer

Celebrate, film fans, and feast your eyes—the long-awaited Coyote vs. ACME trailer is here, and it's good.

After years of being blown up, flattened, dropped from great heights, and destroyed by faulty ACME products in his pursuit of the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote finally decides to fight back. How does he do that? He gets a lawyer. Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a billboard accident attorney, takes the case and squares off against slick corporate counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena), who's also Kevin's former boss.

We honestly can't believe we almost missed out on this wacky adventure, all because Warner Bros. wanted a tax write-off.

Check out the trailer here, then dive into all the drama that brought us to this moment.

The Development

Development on Coyote vs. Acme goes back to August 2018, when Warner Bros. announced the project.

Dave Green (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows) eventually came on to direct the live-action/animated hybrid.

The film is a $70 million production starring Will Forte as Wile E. Coyote's lawyer and John Cena as opposing corporate counsel and was originally slated for a July 21, 2023, release, per Variety.

The studio pulled it from that slot in April 2022, replacing it with Barbie.

Then the news hit.

The Ax

The pandemic really did a number on the industry, and everyone was still trying to figure out how to bounce back. Still, I remember the buzz around this film being pretty high. Then, on November 9, 2023, Warner Bros. announced that the completed film would not be released. The studio preferred to claim a tax loss of roughly $30 million instead.

The crew was not informed until after the film was already finished. It was the third casualty of Warner Bros.' post-pandemic cost-cutting, following the shelving of the $90 million Batgirl and the kid-friendly Scoob! Holiday Haunt, according to Variety.

“Extreme frustration, fiery frustration, a lot of anger, white-hot anger,” Forte told Entertainment Weekly of his feelings at the time.

On the other side, CEO and President of Warner Bros. Discovery David Zaslav told The New York Times, “The question is, should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And [the] Warner Bros. team and HBO made a number of decisions. They were hard. But when I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage.”

It might not make much sense for a studio not to release a finished project that could make it money. But it's all accounting.

NPR dug into this, and the short version is that when a studio writes off a project as a total loss, that loss can offset taxable income elsewhere on the balance sheet. The film becomes more valuable as a write-off than as a release.

Stephen Glaeser, an accounting professor at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School, told NPR that any tax benefit softens the blow. The studio still loses money, just slightly less.

It's legal and "just business," but it's also a pretty brutal outcome for everyone who spent years working on a creative endeavor.

The Backlash

The industry did not take this quietly. Director Dave Green had delivered the film on budget, hit strong test scores, and even relocated to London for 18 months to save the studio money on post-production, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Friends and collaborators rallied publicly, with writer-director BenDavid Grabinski tweeting that it was "the best of its kind since Roger Rabbit" and asking, "I thought the goal of this business was to make hit movies?"

Brian Duffield tweeted, "I have seen this movie, and it is excellent. It also tested in the high 90s repeatedly. It also had interested buyers. The people working at Warner Bros. are anti-art, and I hope multiple anvils drop on their heads."

The hashtags #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme and #SaveCoyoteVsAcme exploded in February 2024. Voice actor Eric Bauza even broke into his Daffy Duck voice at the Annie Awards to say, "I hate to be political, but release Coyote vs. Acme!"

The Reversal

Within days of the original news, Warner Bros. hit reverse and allowed Green to shop the film to other buyers, per The Hollywood Reporter.

But a buyer didn't materialize quickly. A Warner Bros. spokesperson told The New York Times in 2024 that the film "remains available for acquisition," which meant it was stuck in a form of development hell, even though it was already in the can.

The Rescue

On March 31, 2025, Ketchup Entertainment made it official, acquiring worldwide distribution rights from Warner Bros. for a deal reportedly worth around $50 million, per Deadline.

Gareth West, CEO of Ketchup Entertainment, said in a statement, “We’re thrilled to have made a deal with Warner Bros. Pictures to bring this film to audiences worldwide. Coyote vs. Acme is a perfect blend of nostalgia and modern storytelling, capturing the essence of the beloved Looney Tunes characters while introducing them to a new generation. We believe it will resonate with both longtime fans and newcomers alike.”

Ketchup had already navigated a similar situation with The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, which Warner Bros. had also chosen to shop rather than release.

Forte told Entertainment Weekly, "Everything happens for a reason, and it is certainly possible that the crazy journey that this movie is taking will help get more eyes on it, because it's a story people know about a little bit. But I don't think we needed this crazy journey."

The film is now scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release on August 28, 2026.

Coyote vs. Acme is produced by Chris deFaria and James Gunn and written by Samy Burch. Will Forte, John Cena, Lana Condor, and Tone Bell star.

Ketchup is marketing the movie as "The Film Acme Didn't Want You to See" in a nod to the studio drama that led us here.

Are you excited to see this one?