If Coyote vs. Acme had been released back in 2023 like it was supposed to be, it would have been praised as a clever, funny, endearing update to everyone’s favorite Looney Tunes characters. Because that’s what it is. And then it would have been fondly remembered by some people and more or less forgotten by others.
Instead, Warner Bros. decided to kill the already completed movie, and never release it, in order to obtain a tax write-off, and the film became something of a cause célèbre, especially after incredible word-of-mouth promotion from the people who’d actually seen it. And now it has a new distributor, and instead of a fun piece of entertainment that skewers corporate greed, which is a time-honored tradition in American movies, the film seems like a trenchant, of-the-moment commentary on the shady, cruel dealings of enormous companies that care only about massive profits.
We all know how Wile E. Coyote has chased the Road Runner for decades, never able to catch him, often because of the malfunction of the Acme products the coyote employs in his pursuit. Well, Mr. Coyote has had enough, and he decides to sue the Acme Corporation, hiring a fairly lazy lawyer played by Will Forte, and the movie also becomes a legal drama—or, well, a legal comedy—with mysterious characters on the other end of the phone and the requisite courtroom climax where the fat cats get their comeuppance.
The movie does a wonderful job of staying true to the characters we know from these cartoons while also allowing a few of them some small amount of growth, it has a ton of smart sight and sound gags that call back to the Looney Tunes universe without feeling too much like fan service, and we feel like we’re in a constant state of chuckling, if not outright belly laughs. And all of that is plenty good enough, even without Warner underlining their own appalling behavior in the real world. But if corporations are going to continue to make such terrible decisions, at least we can make fun of them for it.
Coyote vs. Acme is in theaters.
