There will be spoilers throughout but everyone should watch this and go in clean. There isn’t much to spoil, but I do need to cover some gags and character beats and I don’t feel like doing the non-spoiler first thing for this one. It’s just a funny movie that you’ll have a lot of fun with. And you should watch this. It’s important. And I’ll tell you why.

Coyote vs. Acme (2026) stars Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena, Tone Bell, Martha Kelly, Luis Guzmán, P.J. Byrne, John Early, Nancy Linehan Charles, and Kenneth Choi. It also features Eric Bauza as Bugs Bunny, Charlie Dog, Daffy Duck, Dr. Lorre, Elmer Fudd, Foghorn Leghorn, Gossamer, Porky Pig, Road Runner, and Tweety. Good for you, man. Plus Candi Milo as Granny, Miss Prissy, and Witch Hazel, and Jim Cummings as the Tasmanian Devil. It was written by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Samy Burch, based on a New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, and directed by Dave Green.

Quick Plot Rundown –
IMDb says “After enduring years of malfunctioning products, Wile E. Coyote teams up with a local personal injury attorney to take on ACME, the manufacturer of anything and everything used by the Looney Tunes characters.”

That’s essentially the plot. There’s not really much more to explain. As movie titles go, it says it all. I’ll just add that Will Forte plays the attorney taking on ACME, John Cena is ACME’s evil lawyer. And there’s a massive conspiracy at play. If you don’t know anything about the Looney Tunes somehow then you need to know that Wile E. Coyote exists purely to try and kill the roadrunner. He does so through complicated schemes involving ACME products that are always faulty. So this is him finally seeking legal compensation for years of pain and disfigurement at the hands of a company that has exclusively harmed him. Got it? Good.

That sounds like a pretty solid idea for a movie, right? In a world of live action/animation hybrid movies that are largely bad, (With at least two that are quite good) this is one with a genuinely good idea at its core that feels like a slam dunk. The people who made this movie are all quite talented and clearly in love with the world they’re working with. Any studio in their right mind would be delighted to have a movie like this on their release schedule.

How The Heck Did We Get Here?! –
It turns out that the studio who owns the Looney Tunes was not delighted about this movie. Or, rather, they were, but for different reasons. I’ll remind you that Coyote vs ACME is a movie about the little guy fighting against a big evil corporation who is doing nefarious stuff and, in the world of this movie, has a monopoly over all industry essentially. And this is where Warner Brothers comes in. Or it will be, I just think the production of this movie is especially important to highlight what went wrong and how long some of these things take to come together.

The core idea of this movie is from a New Yorker story written by Ian Frazier and published in 1990. The short piece, which I read before writing this review, is essentially a transcript of the Defense outlining the various disfigurements Wile E. Coyote has suffered due to the ACME corporation. It’s pretty funny, having ridiculous cartoon injuries read out in serious official court jargon. But it also wears thin a bit towards the end, so it’s good the piece isn’t that long. The rights were purchased in 1998 and a whole bunch of bullshit and reshuffling happened in the way that some movies take forever to come together.

Production and editing and what have you was finished for this movie by November 9th, 2023, when it was announced that Warner Brothers, now Warner Bros. Discovery, would be shelving the film and claiming a tax loss of $30 million. This was the third time they’d done this. It was all put into place by the recently hired CEO. This man was the CEO of Discovery and had taken over in a merger. And of course, as CEO, his goal is to make the company money. And if I were the CEO of a legacy film studio that has released hundreds if not thousands of beloved movies, I would do that by making good movies for smaller amounts of money.

This rotten troll of a man (His name is David Zaslav) instead did this by laying off hundreds of people and getting rid of movies. He did so with the intention of trimming the fat so he could sell the studio to another movie studio, thus creating a monopoly. And he’s been doing just that, if you haven’t heard of how Paramount is in the midst of buying Warner Brothers. Paramount, by the way, led by David Ellison, another troll of a man whose career was purchased for him by his rich troll dad. David Ellison is a horrid man who intends to gut Warner and Paramount’s news outlets and turn them into pro-Trump mechanisms, since he helped fund the last election and he’s a huge Trump fan. The world’s a horrible place, you see.

Warner pissed everyone off by shelving this movie and actors and filmmakers from all over were going to stop working with them. So Warner said “Fine, we’ll shop the movie around to other studios who want to buy it”. But they kept asking for too much money, purposefully, so that nobody would want to buy it, and put it back on the shelf. And a year ago, after buying another shelved Looney Tunes movie, a studio called Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights to Coyote vs ACME, which is finally, after three long years, in theaters. The little guy has, for the time being, won.

I say that because if you Google where The Day The Earth Blew Up (The last Looney Tunes movie) is streaming, it’s available to watch right now on HBO Max. As is My Adventures With Superman and countless other films and shows that Warner sold to other companies. And despite the countless people attempting to prevent the merger from occurring, it probably will. But that’s the point of this movie, which is now made better and almost biblical by the meta narrative of how this film was finally released.

It’s hard to not feel a tad cynical about all of this regardless. Because I feel that if the puffy coat wearing, fake teeth having David Zaslav and the rest of the jerks at Warner wanted to bury this forever, the movie never would have been allowed to be purchased in the first place. Maybe they were pressured to release it. Maybe they wanted to be done hearing people mention it, like with the Snyder Cut. I’m just sick of living in a world where the big guy always, always wins in the end. Which is not the takeaway someone should have from watching this movie, to be clear. But now that we’re all good and depressed, let’s get on with the review.

General Thoughts –
It’s just a pretty good movie, honestly. Like I said, I think this movie really benefitted from all the bullshit that happened. It all feels far more poignant at this point. I think without that extra layer it would just be a pretty good movie. There’s a few things going for this, first and foremost. The concept is pretty great. And it’s centered around the Looney Tunes, who rule. But in addition to that, the casting is inspired.

The secret weapon to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? as any person who loves that movie can tell you, is not the animation or Roger or Jessica, despite how attractive she’s meant to be. It’s Bob Hoskins as Eddie Valiant. There is, perhaps, no performance in the history of cinema as transcendent, as fully committed, as inspiring as that one. Nobody has ever acted opposite nothing with the passion and verve that Hoskins did. You can’t compete with that.

Will Forte, as Kevin Avery, the main lawyer in this film, is pretty much best case scenario for this kind of movie. He’s playing a classic Will Forte type. The sad sack, the underdog. It is a somewhat cartoonish performance, but he is playing it as a real guy who never wins, which makes sense. I do think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity that he never gets the chance to go full cartoon, like he would if he were playing MacGruber. But he’s great.

I will say, if you’re going to compare him to Bob Hoskins, his performance isn’t anywhere near as good. But again, nothing really is. The worst thing about this movie, and Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers, and any movie in this genre, is that they will always be compared to Roger Rabbit, and they will always look like crap because of that, regardless of quality. On its own merits this movie is good. It achieves exactly what it sets out to do. But I’ve gotten ahead of myself.

Again, in terms of comparisons, Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom is one of the great cinematic villains, truly menacing and creepy and fun. John Cena as well feels somewhat restrained in this. His role is to play the douchey lawyer, and he does it well, but there isn’t really anything more to that performance. He has this past with Forte’s character that’s never really explored beyond Cena calling him a loser, which feels like a missed opportunity. This, by the way, is why it’s difficult to review this kind of movie, everything’s a cartoon so technically none of the stakes matter until they do really matter. So it’s hard to know how much I should care about logic.

I just need to emphasize that I appreciate that Forte is the lead. A lot of people love him, myself included, but that shows this movie is made by people who knew what they were doing and wanted to make a good thing. You get that throughout the cast. Martha Kelly as one of the other lawyers. Great. Perfect deadpan performer. Kenneth Choi gets a scene as a slimy dickhead lawyer. He’s in it for two seconds but he’s great. John Early as the annoying reporter and P.J. Byrne as the bootlicking assistant to Cena. These are all excellent choices. And then there’s Luis Guzmán as the Judge. Hats off to whoever made that call. That’s genius work right there. He’s not in it as much as I would like, but he does exactly what he does best. Everyone in this does.

Nitpicking –
This is, again, a somewhat difficult movie to review, because I do have issues with it. But because of what it is, and the obstacles it faced to get here, it’s kind of hard to critique it. But this is who I am, and I do have some issues. The movie goes along much as you’d think it would, if you’re not planning on watching it or if you are, there isn’t much to spoil. They don’t really win the court case but in a way they sort of do. There are, I think in total, three courtroom scenes in this film, two with Luis Guzmán and one Senate meeting led by Senator Elmer Fudd. I liked that a lot. It was a bummer to lose Luis but Fudd’s good too.

The first courtroom scene is a lot of establishing gags and the last one is a bunch of poignant reveals and payoffs, and there’s plenty of non-court scenes in between that are about figuring out the conspiracy. Which, by the way, they have to be dragged through, because even when assisted by Kevin’s niece Paige (Lana Condor bringing a welcome amount of sincerity to the role) these guys are bad at their job. I guess they mainly settle cases, but still.

What I’m saying is there’s not a lot of court stuff, and there was a first draft written by James Gunn’s childhood friend back when this was optioned as an idea in Gunn’s Scooby-Doo days that focused a lot on the main conceit of the New Yorker story. As I said, the whole gag of that story is listing off stupid cartoon disfigurements in a serious lawyerly tone, and they don’t even really do that in this. Will Forte can’t even make his opening remarks properly and Wile E. brings out the devices and reenacts them in person. I understand this is a movie for everyone in theory and having wordy scenes explaining injuries may not play for every audience, but there’s a gag about bottomless portrait classes with Porky Pig and at one point P.J. Byrne huffs cartoon glue. I think it would have worked.

The way this world is set up is kind of confusing as well. In Roger Rabbit and Chip ‘n Dale there is a somewhat clear delineation of what cartoons do and what people do. Everything is very specific and has its purpose. In this, the reveal ends up being that ACME has been testing their cartoon products on cartoons in order to make the products they sell to humans better and more reliable. Very common evil company thing to do. But the point is raised, somewhat reasonably in the movie, that the cartoons bounce back and it entertains people so it’s just a matter of dignity. But also Daffy Duck has been in an insane asylum for thirty years and has a breakdown if anyone says ACME around him. So there is a consequence. Until the end when he turns up and seems fine. Again, looking for logic in an illogical universe, I know.

But there’s also the logic of what is and isn’t animated in the first place. Usually if an animated character interacts with it, it is animated. And to build out the world of ACME making cartoon products and non-cartoon products, that makes sense. But it still feels completely random. There’s an animated hydraulic jack that makes a regular wall move like a cartoon. Animated process servers bring animated bundles of paper lawsuits from animated printers. John Cena’s pencils are animated rather than normal because the pencils have eyes and get scared and he can crush them. But then why doesn’t the jack have eyes and a personality? It feels like there’s an inherent inconsistency to this universe because everything feels arbitrary.

And the animation itself is sometimes a liiiiittle spotty, mainly in an uncanny valley way because of the kind of animation they utilized. Bugs Bunny shows up and looks great but also completely different in terms of how he’s animated and how he interacts with the world because that scene was apparently added late in the day. Wile E. and the Roadrunner look great, and pretty much all of the more cartoony characters do as well. But there’s something off about the way Foghorn Leghorn, Granny, and Dr. Lorre look. It’s just… odd. That’s a bummer. It’s not going to bother everyone or even most people, but it sort of did me.

Other than that, I quite enjoy it. I think it’s a very funny movie with a very nice message at the core of it. It is an odd choice where they decide to go with Wile E.’s arc, considering he is an inherently violent and predatory character who just wants to eat. But it works. I do think there are parts of this movie where the jokes kind of stop and it feels weird. They start out really joke heavy and lose the balance of comedy and poignancy a bit along the way.

Characters –
Usually this is a whole dedicated segment of the review but I did this already and instead of cutting this part out I’d like to take the time to spotlight a character who is not in this movie but has a visual cameo. Will Forte’s character lives in a motel and he’s trying to get Wile E. a room but the motel owner has a “No Pets” sign featuring a photo of none other than the legend himself, Droopy Dog. Instagram has started serving me clips of old Looney Tunes cartoons, which is how I very recently fell in love with Droopy Dog, particularly in the short Northwest Hounded Police.

And while I understand why he is on that sign and it’s a nice cameo of sorts, I would like to point out that Droopy is not a pet. More often than not he is a police officer of some kind hunting down a vigilante wolf with inexplicable ease. And occasionally he has a girlfriend or meets an attractive woman who gives him a kiss at the end, causing him to abandon his dry calm demeanor and explode across the sky in a flurry of fireworks and cries of “YIPEE!” Which I believe is meant to suggest that he is horny. Anyway, show Droopy some respect. What a legend.

Jokes/Good Bits –
– The law firm in this, Avery, Jones and Maltese, is a reference to the Looney Tunes animators Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese.
– Wile E.’s idea to take ACME to court is spurred on by him catching one of Will Forte’s ads on TV, which is very funny and specific.
“Have you ever painted a realistic tunnel onto the side of a mesa, only to have that tunnel somehow come to life? And then a speeding train comes out of that tunnel and hits you? But the train doesn’t kill you on impact. It knocks you over the edge of a cliff and down a 10,000 foot canyon where you land in an abandoned mine field?”
It keeps going. That one isn’t in the movie, that’s for a TV ad in our world.
– It kind of highlights an issue with the movie but when Will Forte’s ad plays, detailing very specific scenarios Wile E. has been in thousands of times, we see clips of old shorts like my favorite: Wile E. sawing a hole in a bridge for the Roadrunner to fall through, only for the rest of the bridge to somehow fall instead. That montage kind of highlights how I’d be more than happy if the movie was just clips of old cartoons. Especially because the animation in those is superb.
– Lana Condor has a few good lines, at one point she says she was considering majoring in “Mysterious Tunnels” at College. Another bit is when she says she always wanted to throw a bomb through a window but could never find the right time.
– John Cena and P.J. Byrne wear bolo ties for the vast majority of the film and they’re often extravagant and ridiculous. Sometimes they match. Though it’s a little irritating that they don’t always match and at the Senate meeting they’re wearing normal ties. I want bolo consistency.
– At one point the camera pans by a shelf full of books on Anvil Law.
– There’s an animated spider on a road sign who ensnares a fly or something and then the spider whips out a knife and the fly gives him its wallet. Classic stuff.
– The big ACME conspiracy is centered around “Project Sisyphus”, and the poster is Wile E. pushing a bomb up a hill. It’s not a subtle comparison to make and they hammer their point home many times throughout the film but it is a good thing to frame the narrative around. Especially considering Wile E. can’t talk.
– I had this spoiled for me, but the big emotional climax of the movie is when they’re in the Senate hearing, the Roadrunner speeds in to testify with his beeps and meeps. He tells everyone that Wile E. was screwed by ACME and the products malfunctioning is not his fault. And then, through I think Morse Code and the court stenographer, he asks Wile E. “Are you coming back?” Which is a pretty beautiful moment. The Roadrunner likes getting chased. But also what a toxic relationship, that evil coyote just starves for decades while the Roadrunner torments him. I guess it works for them though.
– There is a mid-movie reveal that I genuinely did not see coming when we learn that Wile E. does not give a shit about the trial in terms of getting justice for himself and all the other toons that have been harmed. He just wants to get the Roadrunner on the witness stand so he can trap him, kill him, and eat him. That’s maybe the best part of the movie for me, because it caught me off guard and it’s a perfect bit that also adds conflict to the movie at the perfect time. The conspiracy is fairly obvious but because they all suck at their jobs and people have to tell them what’s going on, it’s good that there’s an extra layer. That could get boring. And Wile E. has a recipe for Roadrunner Wellington.
– Oh right, scratch that, my actual favorite bit is when Will Forte and Wile E. are being thrown out of ACME for denying their settlement offer and P.J. Byrne yells “And guess what?! We don’t validate parking!!!” And throws Forte’s ticket at him. That’s good stuff.

Fuck Warner Brothers –
That’s really all that’s left to say. Obviously I’m still largely a fan of what James Gunn is doing. Lanterns is good fun, I’m excited for The People v. Gorilla Grodd, another courtroom based narrative. I do think it’s odd they’ve barely marketed Clayface considering it’s out in a month. But yeah, otherwise, fuck Warner Brothers. I went on there to watch the new episode of Lanterns the other day and they tried to make me watch the trailer for the Harry Potter TV show. Eat shit, David. You suck.

Overall Rating – 8.5/10(I feel like I’ve damned this movie with faint praise but I really did enjoy it. And more than anything, I’m glad it exists. Every movie that has been made deserves to come out. People worked on that and it should be seen, regardless of quality. Except for Michael. That movie’s existence enrages me to an irrational degree.)
Rudd Rating – 0/10(He was in Chip ‘n Dale! You could have put him in this, easily! Him and Forte are in similar circles! Come on, guys. Harumph.)

Next time on Too Many Servings Of John… Something! It’ll either be a Ruddtrospective, a Flying Nun Recap, or a random thing. But I’m off work for a week, so I’m trying to write a few things.