Coyote vs. Acme

After decades of being blown to bits by faulty bombs, demolished by dynamite, mangled by magnets and dropped off every cliff in the American Southwest, Wile E. Coyote decides he has had enough. Every one of those catastrophes came out of the same box, stamped with the same three letters, and the Coyote wants his day in court. He finds it in Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a burnt-out billboard accident lawyer whose career has shrunk to the size of his advertising budget and whose relationship with his family is running on fumes.

Standing between them and justice is Buddy Crane (John Cena), Kevin's former colleague turned slick lead counsel for ACME, Inc., the profit-obsessed conglomerate behind every exploding anvil and rocket-powered rollerskate. Crane is everything the system rewards: polished, ruthless and utterly untroubled by the trail of craters his client leaves behind. Kevin, aided by his niece Paige (Lana Condor) and the skeleton crew of his tiny firm, has almost nothing except a client who cannot speak, a mountain of receipts, and a stubbornness he had forgotten he owned.

Directed by Dave Green as a live-action/animation hybrid and drawn from Ian Frazier's New Yorker humor piece "Coyote v. Acme," the film runs the classic Looney Tunes physics through a legal procedural. The result is a family comedy that plays the gags straight and the emotions straighter — a nostalgic, unexpectedly heartfelt crowd-pleaser about persistence, about the people who quit and the ones who cannot.

At its heart, Coyote vs. Acme is about the dignity of not giving up — and about who profits when you do. The Coyote has spent a lifetime being defined by failure, an eternal punchline whose entire cultural identity is losing. The film's central move is to reframe that doggedness not as stupidity but as integrity: he keeps getting up, and that refusal is the one thing ACME's business model cannot price in.

Against that stands Kevin Avery, a man who did the sensible thing and gave up — took the easy road, shrank his ambitions, let a system built to valorize men like Buddy Crane tell him what he was worth. The film argues that the truly damaging failure is not the anvil that lands on you but the moment you decide you deserved it. Kevin does not save the Coyote; the Coyote reminds Kevin how to chase something.

Wrapped around that is a pointed anti-corporate thesis: an institution that manufactures harm, externalizes the cost onto the bodies of the powerless, and then out-lawyers anyone who objects. The film insists that accountability is worth pursuing even when the verdict goes the wrong way — that losing loudly can be its own kind of win.

The ending as genuine victory or as consolation prize. The Coyote and Kevin lose the titular case, but the effort opens the door to ACME's eventual defeat and changes how the world sees the company. One reading takes this as the film's most mature idea: that structural change comes from accumulated pressure rather than a single verdict, and that losing publicly can be more useful than winning quietly. The opposing reading — voiced by critics who felt the film ties too neat a bow — is that the movie immediately replaces its heartfelt, complicated conclusion with a simple, clichéd resolution that delivers an unearned triumph and undercuts the honesty of the loss.

Coyote vs. Acme became a landmark in film culture before anyone outside test screenings had seen a frame of it. When Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the finished movie in November 2023 for an estimated $30 million tax write-off, it crystallized a fear that had been building through the streaming era: that completed art could simply be made to disappear for accounting reasons. Coming after similar disappearances at the same studio, the decision provoked an unusually broad backlash — from talent including Will Forte, from the animation community, and from fans who emailed, organized and picketed.

That pressure worked. Warner Bros. reversed course, opened the rights to bidders, and in 2025 Ketchup Entertainment paid roughly $50 million for North American distribution, releasing the film on August 28, 2026. Its marketing turned the ordeal into text, with a teaser openly needling the studio over the write-off under the guise of "ACME Corp. meddling" — an unusually meta act of self-aware promotion.

The result is a film whose off-screen story rhymes almost too neatly with its on-screen one: an underdog flattened by a conglomerate, refusing to stay flattened. Critics received it warmly, with reviews calling it a clever, nostalgic and unexpectedly heartfelt crowd-pleaser and an underdog triumph, and NPR highlighting its timely message about runaway corporate power. Its roughly $44 million theatrical gross — exceeding the write-off taken against it — was widely reported as an indictment of the original decision, and the phrase "Coyote vs. Acme" now functions as shorthand in industry discourse for films buried by their own studios.

Broadly warm, with a heavy thumb on the scale from the film's own backstory. Critics and audiences alike described it as hilarious, nostalgic and unexpectedly heartfelt — a genuine crowd-pleaser and, in the framing many reviewers reached for, an underdog triumph. The most consistent praise went to the central pairing: Will Forte striking exactly the right tone as a man ground down by a system built to reward people like his former ally, and John Cena leaning into his alpha-male presence as ACME's counsel, their comic energies balancing each other. The live-action/animation hybrid, the density of Looney Tunes Easter eggs and cameos, and the film's willingness to give the Coyote real emotional weight were all singled out.

Criticisms clustered around the resolution. Several reviewers felt the film ties too neat a bow, swapping a heartfelt conclusion for a simple, clichéd ending that reads as an unearned victory. Others noted the thinness of the female roles — Lana Condor's Paige is key to the story but the only major female character — and a certain formulaic safety in the family-comedy scaffolding around the sharper anti-corporate material.

The controversy is inseparable from the reception. Watching it in 2026 meant watching a movie about a conglomerate crushing the powerless, made by people whose movie had been crushed by a conglomerate, in a theater it reached only because the public objected. Its roughly $44 million gross — more than the write-off taken against it — was received less as a box office result than as a verdict. Overall verdict: not a masterpiece, but a smart, funny, big-hearted family film that comfortably vindicated the campaign to save it.