Coyote vs. ACME (2026)

Someday someone will write a book (or at least a very thorough oral history) about the long, strange trip Coyote vs. ACME took to make it into theaters, from its origins as a 1990 article in The New Yorker to the business practices of the David Zaslav-run Warner Bros. Discovery to the interjection of Ketchup Entertainment. It will be fascinating, but for now I think what’s more important is that the movie was so entertaining that none of that mattered. It’s an absolute blast, and would have been without the added baggage of corporate stupidity, however ironic it seems now that things are actually worse for WBD than they were when the film was shelved in 2023.

It doesn’t have the same kinetic energy as Chuck Jones’ Road Runner cartoons. one of the post-Who Framed Roger Rabbit attempts at meshing the Looney Tunes with real world actors have that spark, but Coyote vs. ACME effectively masks for it by taking on the framework of a legal thriller as opposed to the sports movie or Bondian action films the Looney Tunes have gamely carried. It’s so good at working this lane that the intrusion of some of the larger characters beyond the Coyote/Road Runner dynamic feels unnecessary, like it and the overarching conspiracy plot they prop up was written to satisfy the nerves of a studio that ultimately didn’t believe in the project.

The core premise is so good, and the main human performances by Will Forte and John Cena so committed, that it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day it’s small lawyer vs. corporate lawyer, little guy vs. corporate conglomerate, and that shit sings in spite of the frame narrative. It’s a generous love-letter to the source material, a film packed with so many gags the audience I saw it with was reduced to repeating their punchlines in disbelief. Like last year’s The Naked Gun, detailing any of them here, days after release, feels like a disservice to the people who crafted them. As soon as I can make whatever this site’s equivalent to a Letterboxd list is, all bets are off.