Coyote vs. Acme

“Deleted,” Leaked & Resurrected: The Bonkers Real-Life Saga of Coyote vs. ACME (2026)

The movie where Wile E. finally sues the people who sold him all those exploding gadgets was almost deleted like a bad file. Instead, it turned into one of Hollywood’s most chaotic comeback stories. Here’s the juiciest, 100% real-world drama behind the toon mayhem.

Studio Drama: The Movie WB Tried to Bury

• In November 2023, Warner Bros. decided Coyote vs. ACME — fully shot, scored, and reportedly testing well with audiences — would never be released so they could claim roughly a $30 million tax write-off. It would’ve joined Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt in the corporate graveyard.
• Star Will Forte (playing billboard-lawyer-turned-coyote-defender Kevin Avery) said he felt “extreme…white-hot anger” when he found out, later calling the choice something he “f***ing hate[s],” even while insisting the finished movie is “incredible” and “magical.”
• John Cena, who plays ACME’s sharky attorney Buddy Crane, took the good-cop route. He called it “a bunch of fun” and said he was just glad it was finally out of the “dusty box,” a very polite way of saying “my movie was locked in a vault for no good reason.”
• The industry went off. Filmmakers like Phil Lord and Christopher Miller publicly slammed the decision, while animation pros and reps blasted the idea that a completed film could simply be deleted for accounting purposes.

Fans vs. ACME: Hashtag Uprising & a $50 Million Rescue

• The shelving sparked an online riot: hashtags #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme and #SaveCoyoteVsAcme trended as fans, animators, and even other directors begged WB to let the movie live.
• Voice actor Eric Bauza (the modern voice of half the Looney Tunes cast) even used his Annie Awards spotlight to hype the film and nudge the studio in front of the entire animation community.
• Under pressure, Warner Bros. allowed the filmmakers to shop the movie around. Streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Paramount circled, but WB initially rejected offers reportedly in the $75–$80 million range, preferring the tax write-down.
• Plot twist: in March 2025, indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment swooped in and bought the film outright for about $50 million. This turned the once-“deleted” WB title into a Ketchup release, with international sales pushed out of Cannes and a U.S. theatrical date locked for August 28, 2026.

Comic-Con Chaos: ACME “Lawyers” Crash Hall H

• At San Diego Comic-Con 2025, Coyote vs. ACME went full performance art. In Hall H (7,000 fans deep), host Paul Scheer brought out director Dave Green and cast members including Will Forte, Eric Bauza and Martha Kelly — then let fake “ACME lawyers” storm the stage with cease-and-desist papers trying to shut the panel down.
• Will Forte grabbed a mic, yelled “Run the trailer!” and sprinted offstage with an “Acme intern” chasing him as the footage rolled. It was a live-action Looney Tune and a not-so-subtle dig at Warner Bros.’ attempt to bury the film.
• The marketing leaned into the beef: taglines like “The Movie ACME Doesn’t Want You To See” reframed the tax-write-off scandal as in-universe villainy.

Inside the Toon Machine: Silent Coyote, Meep-Meep Choir & Sketchviz

• Wile E. Coyote does not talk in the movie — a deliberate creative rule to keep him true to the originals and avoid turning him into a quippy Marvel hero. The story instead makes the humans (led by Forte and Lana Condor as his niece Paige Avery) interpret his case.
• The film is stuffed with Looney Tunes icons: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, Tweety, Porky Pig, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, Granny and more, voiced mainly by Eric Bauza and Candi Milo.
• Composer Steven Price cooked up a “Meep Meep Choir” — choral arrangements built around Road Runner’s meeps, at one point set to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
• To nail the Roger-Rabbit-style blend of animation and live action, the team used “sketchviz”: 2D animators drew black‑and‑white key poses over rough live‑action edits before VFX started, to lock in Looney Tunes-style timing and expressions.

From Almost-Deleted to Viral Hit

• Shot in Albuquerque in 2022 on a roughly $70–72 million budget, the film was originally headed for a 2023 WB summer slot, reportedly testing “really good” with audiences — and still got canned.
• When the first full trailer finally arrived on April 22, 2026, it pulled around 25.6 million views in 24 hours — a record for an independent family movie — and played like a gleeful subtweet of Warner Bros., with ACME standing in as the soulless corporate overlord.
• Forte now says the whole nightmare might ironically help the movie: all that public anger, fan campaigning, and studio drama turned a mid-budget Looney Tunes legal comedy into 2026’s most unlikely underdog event film.

In other words: after decades of rockets blowing up in his face, Wile E. Coyote finally got a win — on screen and behind the scenes.