Coyote vs. Acme’s Incredible Comeback Finally Hits Theaters (2026)

Hero image is an official promotional still from Coyote vs. Acme, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Ketchup Entertainment, used here for editorial commentary on the film’s release.

Coyote vs. Acme opened in theaters this week, and the fact that it exists at all is the actual story. Warner Bros finished this movie, tested it, then killed it anyway, and the reason it’s playing in theaters right now instead of sitting in a vault forever is a TikTok campaign that refused to let a corporate accounting decision be the last word.

• The shelving: Warner Bros. Discovery killed the finished $70 million film in November 2023 for a $30 million tax write-off, despite test scores 14 points above the family-movie norm
• The campaign: a fan petition topped 20,000 signatures, and a protester in a full Wile E. Coyote costume held a “RELEASE ME” sign outside Warner Bros. studios
• Who joined in: stars John Cena, Will Forte, and Lana Condor, plus filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller
• The rescue: indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment bought the film and announced its release at San Diego Comic-Con 2025
• Opening numbers: 95%+ on Rotten Tomatoes, a $1.7 million Thursday preview, and a projected $17 million-plus opening weekend

Why Coyote vs. Acme almost never existed

In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery shelved a completely finished $70 million film, live-action and animated, starring John Cena, Will Forte, and Lana Condor. Not delayed. Shelved, permanently, on purpose. CEO David Zaslav’s post-merger cost-cutting strategy included writing off already-completed films when the studio calculated a tax benefit would be worth more than a theatrical release, and Coyote vs. Acme became the clearest, most publicized example of the practice. The decision landed even worse because the movie had tested well, 14 points above the normal benchmark for a family film, meaning Warner Bros. wasn’t killing a bad movie, it was killing a movie its own research said audiences liked.

The mechanism behind that decision is worth spelling out, because “worth more dead than released” sounds absurd until you see how the accounting actually works. A studio that scraps a finished film can claim its full production cost as a loss on its taxes in one go, an immediate, guaranteed write-down. Releasing it instead means spending tens of millions more on marketing and distribution with no guaranteed return, and any profit gets taxed as income rather than offset as a loss. For a studio drowning in merger debt and under pressure to show quick improvement to shareholders, a guaranteed tax loss can genuinely beat a risky theatrical bet on paper, even for a movie executives privately believed was good. That’s the mechanism a $30 million write-off exploited, and it’s the same mechanism that buried Coyote vs. Acme’s stablemates.

The TikTok campaign that wouldn’t let it die

What happened next is the part that’s actually about TikTok, not just about a Looney Tunes movie. A fan petition passed 20,000 signatures. Filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller, along with Batgirl directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, spoke out publicly against the decision. Stars John Cena, Will Forte, Lana Condor, and voice actor Eric Bauza joined in, with Bauza shouting “Release Coyote vs. Acme” from the stage at the 51st Annie Awards.

The moment that actually carried the campaign, though, was a single fan named Marco Vaccaro, who put on a full Wile E. Coyote costume and stood outside Warner Bros. Studios in the rain holding a sign that read “RELEASE ME.” The video of his one-person protest spread across TikTok and became the movement’s unofficial symbol, a costume and a handwritten sign doing more to keep the story alive than any single celebrity statement.

@consequence

A fan dressed as Wile E. Coyote demanded for the release of the shelved Coyote vs. Acme film outside of Warner Bros. Studios on Tusday. Credit: Discussing Film. #coyotevsacme #wileecoyote #warnerbros #looneytunes #film #funny

♬ original sound – consequence

How Coyote vs. Acme actually got rescued

Pressure alone doesn’t reopen a studio’s books, but it does change who’s willing to make a deal. Indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment acquired Coyote vs. Acme and announced its rescue at San Diego Comic-Con 2025, nearly two years after the shelving. That’s the part worth being precise about: Warner Bros. didn’t reverse its own decision, a smaller outside distributor bought the finished film and did the release Warner Bros. wouldn’t. The campaign didn’t change Warner Bros.’s mind, it created enough public attention that someone else saw an opportunity the original studio had written off.

Ketchup Entertainment isn’t a fly-by-night rescue outfit either, which matters for anyone wondering whether the film actually got a real release or just a token one. Founded in 2011, the company has distributed Hypnotic with Ben Affleck, Memory with Jessica Chastain, and, notably, another Looney Tunes property, 2024’s The Day the Earth Blew Up. That prior track record with the exact same IP is likely part of why Warner Bros. was comfortable selling Coyote vs. Acme to them specifically rather than shopping it more broadly, a distributor who already understood the property and had shown it could perform.

Here’s the official trailer, the version Ketchup Entertainment and Warner Bros. Pictures actually put in front of audiences once the film had a release date again:

Not every shelved movie gets saved

Coyote vs. Acme wasn’t Warner Bros. Discovery’s first tax-write-off casualty, and this is the part of the story that keeps the whole thing from reading as a simple underdog win. Batgirl, a $90 million film that was also fully or nearly complete, got shelved in 2022, a year before Coyote vs. Acme. Two Scooby-Doo projects met the same fate. Batgirl remains buried today, with no rescue, no indie distributor, no theatrical release. The campaign to save it never generated the same sustained TikTok momentum, and Warner Bros. has shown no sign of reversing course on it.

Coyote vs. Acme director Dave Green has said the crew initially assumed their film was safe precisely because they’d watched Batgirl get shelved the year before and figured it was a one-time, merger-era anomaly rather than a new standard practice. They were wrong, and only one of the two films ultimately got a second life. That distinction matters for anyone tempted to read this story as proof that public pressure reliably fixes these decisions. It doesn’t, reliably. It worked once, for a movie that also had strong test scores, a starry cast willing to speak up, and a distributor willing to make a bet. Batgirl had passionate advocates too and stayed buried anyway.

Coyote vs. Acme, three years later: how it’s actually doing

The opening numbers are the closest thing this story has to a verdict. Coyote vs. Acme is sitting at 95%+ on Rotten Tomatoes with critics and in the low 90s with audiences, a Metacritic score of 77, and reviews that specifically praise it as smarter and funnier than a shelved-for-a-write-off film had any reason to be. Thursday preview numbers came in at $1.7 million, pushing weekend projections up to $17 million or more, above the $12-18 million range analysts had forecast before those previews landed.

Part of why critics keep singling it out is the premise itself doubles as commentary. Down-and-out billboard attorney Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, agrees to represent Wile E. Coyote in an actual lawsuit against the Acme Corporation over its long history of faulty, dangerous products, with John Cena playing Acme’s corporate defense counsel. Reviewers have called it a genuinely clever courtroom comedy that treats its Looney Tunes premise with more structural discipline than a cartoon-legacy cash-in usually gets, rather than just stringing together nostalgia gags.

None of that erases what happened in 2023, and it shouldn’t. A movie doing well three years after being written off as worthless is exactly the kind of result that makes the original decision look worse in hindsight, not better.

Why this matters beyond one coyote

Coyote vs. Acme isn’t the only finished project a studio has shelved purely for a tax benefit since streaming-era accounting made the practice attractive, it’s just the one a TikTok-driven campaign happened to save. That’s the real precedent worth watching. Every future shelving decision now gets made with the knowledge that a costume, a sign, and a viral clip previously turned a permanently buried $70 million film back into a theatrical release with a 95% critics’ score. Studios don’t have to reverse course because a campaign is loud, but this is real, recent proof that loud can occasionally be enough to attract a buyer willing to bet the studio was wrong.

It’s also a reminder that TikTok’s relationship with Hollywood runs both directions these days, not just movies feeding trends but fans using the platform to actually push back on a studio decision. We saw the more familiar version of that relationship play out with the Spider-Man ceiling trend, where a movie franchise inspired a viral format rather than the other way around. Coyote vs. Acme is the rarer case of the platform actually changing what gets made available to watch in the first place.

Quick answers

Why was Coyote vs. Acme shelved? Warner Bros. Discovery killed the finished film in November 2023 to claim a roughly $30 million tax write-off, part of CEO David Zaslav’s post-merger cost-cutting strategy.

Did TikTok actually save Coyote vs. Acme? A TikTok-fueled campaign, most visibly Marco Vaccaro’s “RELEASE ME” protest in a Wile E. Coyote costume, kept public pressure on until indie distributor Ketchup Entertainment stepped in to buy and release it.

When did Coyote vs. Acme come out? August 28, 2026, almost three years after it was shelved.

Is Coyote vs. Acme actually good? Reviews say yes. It’s sitting at 95%+ with critics on Rotten Tomatoes and in the low 90s with audiences, with a $17 million-plus opening weekend projected.

Who stars in Coyote vs. Acme? Will Forte and John Cena lead the live-action cast, with Lana Condor and Eric Bauza voicing Looney Tunes characters, directed by Dave Green.

Background on the shelving decision draws on Deadline’s original 2023 reporting and The Hollywood Reporter’s account of the film’s revival, including Dave Green’s comments on Batgirl. Opening-weekend box office and review figures via Deadline’s opening-weekend coverage.