Coyote vs. Acme
Coyote vs. Acme finally hit theaters August 28, 2026, capping off one of the more absurd release sagas in recent memory. Finished back in 2023, Warner Bros. shelved it as a tax write-off, sparking real public backlash from people who actually wanted to see it. It sat dead until Ketchup Entertainment bought the rights on March 31, 2025, which is how we got here. Did Warner Bros. screw itself, or was this genuinely fine to bury?
Wile E. Coyote, self-proclaimed genius, builds elaborate Acme-fueled schemes to catch and eat the Road Runner, and every attempt ends in an explosion, a fall, or the universe’s laws of physics turning against him specifically. This time, rocket boots betray him, and back in his cave he catches a lawyer ad. Kevin Avery, of Avery Associates, specializes in getting money back for clients burned by defective Acme products. Wile wants in, since literally every Acme item he’s ever used has failed him, but Kevin is reluctant to take him on. Kevin’s practice usually handles small claims for cartoon characters; Wile’s case covers every product he’s ever purchased. Wile tricks him into filing anyway, and the legal war between Wile E. Coyote and Acme begins. Can he, Kevin, and the Avery Associates team actually bring Acme down, while uncovering something bigger going on inside the company?
I went in worried this would be bad. Warner Bros. shelving it read like a warning sign. Having actually seen it, I genuinely don’t know what they were thinking. This is a pretty great movie. Not the best of the year, that’s still The Sheep Detectives for me, but a genuinely solid family film. Calling it a kids’ movie undersells it; this leans harder toward people who grew up on Looney Tunes than toward kids today, and that choice pays off. The ideas here are smart, carrying a real meta quality since these are cartoon characters navigating a live-action legal drama. This invites the Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers comparison, but where that film drowned in irony and winking cameo gags (“look, it’s Ugly Sonic, remember that?”), this one does something conceptually similar with far more sincerity and taste.
Wile E. Coyote as a character is built on constant failure: explosions, impossible falls, physics rewritten specifically to screw him. This film takes that try-fail-repeat cycle and turns it into something genuinely motivational, something Will Forte’s Kevin draws real inspiration from. Everything done with Wile and the Road Runner here works. This feels deeply respectful of the Looney Tunes brand. I kept braced for the inevitable “Wile E. Coyote talks in a celebrity voice, that’s the joke” bit, and it never comes, which is a genuine relief. These characters never get undercut for a cheap modern gag. This is technically a deconstruction of the Wile E. Coyote formula, and it’s done the right way, without demeaning the character in the process.
The human cast holds up their end too. Will Forte plays a disheveled lawyer coasting on the bare minimum who gradually becomes genuinely invested in the work. John Cena plays the charismatic corporate villain lawyer well. Story, performances, all land.
The real problem, and it’s a significant one, is the animation on the Looney Tunes characters themselves. Same issue as Rescue Rangers: 3D models given a cel-shaded coat to fake a 2D look, and it often looks bad. The cel-shading gives characters an oily, greasy sheen when they’re supposed to read feathered or furry. Wile and the Road Runner fare best, though even Wile sometimes looks closer to fan-project quality than an actual studio Looney Tunes release. Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn, and any human-adjacent cartoon character just look rough. The film leans into old-school slapstick humor, and the 3D rendering keeps a lot of those jokes from landing the way they should. Traditional 2D animation, something closer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit or even Looney Tunes: Back in Action, would have elevated this significantly, both in character charm and joke timing. As is, it feels cheap in stretches. One late scene with a full crowd of cartoon characters cheering looks like it’s running lower-quality renders, genuinely jarring in a few shots. A real shame, because this story earned a bigger animation budget. Give this the Back in Action treatment and it’s a 9, maybe a 9.5.
Minor nitpick: the runtime sits at an hour forty-three and probably could have trimmed to a clean hour thirty. A motorcycle chase stretch had me quietly checking when it would wrap. Not dragging exactly, just a bit loose. There’s also a falling-out beat between characters that resolves almost immediately after, which makes narrative sense but feels a little rushed getting there, plus a handful of minor plot conveniences scattered around. None of it seriously dents the film.
