' Coyote vs. Acme' Finally Reaches Theatres After Near-Three-Year Limbo
A film that Warner Bros-Discovery once paid to keep off screens is about to play on them. Coyote vs. Acme, a live-action and animation hybrid pairing Looney Tunes characters with a cast led by Will Forte and John Cena, premieres in theatres on 28 August 2026 via Ketchup Entertainment, according to Deadline.
The road here was anything but direct. Warner Bros-Discovery shelved the film in November 2023 and took a $30 million tax write-off to avoid releasing it — the same corporate belt-tightening that also mothballed Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt during the company's merger, per Deadline. A tax write-off, in this context, lets a studio declare a finished film a financial loss and recover part of its cost by never showing it commercially.
For the cast, the cancellation hit hard. Will Forte and Lana Condor attended what they called a "funeral screening" about a week after the shelving, watching the film with the expectation that no audience would ever see it. Both said they held onto hope that it would eventually surface, Forte told Deadline, because that first screening was "so good" (Deadline).
Hope turned out to be well-placed. Ketchup Entertainment, a smaller distributor, acquired the film in March 2025 in a deal reported to be in the $50 million range, Variety reported. Ketchup then teamed with Legion M, a company that specialises in fan-funded film releases, to bring it to market (Deadline). By July 2025, Forte confirmed at San Diego Comic-Con that the film would receive a global release in late summer 2026 (Deadline).
The premise has a cheeky legal hook: Wile E. Coyote sues the Acme Corporation over decades of faulty products — anvils, rocket skates, giant springs — that never worked as advertised. Forte plays Kevin Avery, a late-night TV commercial lawyer who takes the case, Variety notes. The script comes from Samy Burch, working from a story by Burch, James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, and the whole concept traces back to a 1990 New Yorker article by Ian Frazier. The ensemble also includes Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Martha Kelly and Luis Guzmán alongside the animated characters.
Trailers dropped in April and July 2026, each leaning into the courtroom-meets-cartoon chaos (Deadline). The film's official site lists the 28 August opening.
For a project that spent nearly three years in distribution limbo, the release closes one of Hollywood's more unusual recent chapters — a completed film declared dead, written off for tax purposes, then bought back and sent to the very theatres its original studio decided it would never reach.
