‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Review: Warner Bros. Almost Buried This One, and That’s the Real Punchline

Wile E. Coyote has spent decades chasing a bird he was never built to catch, and there is something fitting about the fact that the studio behind him nearly did the same thing to his own movie. ‘Coyote vs. Acme‘ was finished, tested well with audiences, and then shelved entirely so Warner Bros. could claim a tax write-off, a decision that turned this Looney Tunes courtroom comedy into an unlikely symbol of corporate indifference before a single ticket had been sold.

Ketchup Entertainment eventually rescued the film from that fate, and the setup alone tells you everything about the tone waiting inside. Wile E. Coyote, tired of exploding gadgets and collapsing cliffs, decides to take Acme Corporation to court, hiring a down on his luck lawyer played by Will Forte to argue his case against a slick corporate fixer played by John Cena. It is a premise that could have coasted entirely on nostalgia and mascot cameos.

It does not coast. What surprised me most watching this is how confidently it blends courtroom farce with genuine pathos for a character who has never spoken a word of dialogue in eighty years of cartoons. The animated segments retain the anarchic, rubber limbed chaos of the original shorts, full of absurd contraptions and perfectly timed collisions, while the live action half grounds all of that lunacy in a legal drama that actually has stakes worth caring about.

Forte plays exactly the kind of rumpled, principled underdog this story needs, someone who has clearly lost more cases than he has won and finds unexpected purpose in representing a client who cannot testify on his own behalf. Cena, meanwhile, gets to be slippery and self satisfied in a way that suits him, a corporate mouthpiece who believes his own talking points a little too much. Their scenes together carry real comic rhythm, and the film wisely never lets the human plot outstay its welcome before cutting back to Coyote’s side of things.

The screenplay’s biggest achievement is how it reframes decades of failed anvils and painted tunnels into an actual thesis about persistence in the face of a system built to grind you down. That the film’s own production history mirrors its plot only deepens the joke, though I want to be careful not to lean on that irony as a crutch, because the movie earns its themes on its own terms long before you factor in what happened behind the scenes.

It is not flawless. The pacing sags slightly in the middle stretch once the legal proceedings settle into a rhythm, and a few subplots involving supporting Looney Tunes characters feel like obligatory cameos rather than essential threads. The film also occasionally seems unsure whether it wants to fully commit to satire or fully commit to sentiment, and the tonal seesaw between the two is the one place the movie’s confidence wavers.

Still, those are minor scuffs on something that otherwise moves with real wit and unexpected heart. The blend of animation and live action never feels like a gimmick bolted onto a familiar IP, it feels like the actual engine of the story, and by the time the verdict comes down, the film has earned an ending that is somehow both goofy and quietly moving.

I walked in expecting a nostalgia exercise and walked out having genuinely rooted for a coyote who has never uttered a single line of dialogue. Between the sharp legal comedy, the game performances from Forte and Cena, and animation that respects the anarchic spirit of the original shorts without simply repeating it, this is one of the most purely enjoyable studio comedies of the year. I am giving ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ a 9.5 out of 10.

Did this one live up to the hype for you, or do you think the story behind the movie is doing some of the heavy lifting? Drop your verdict in the comments.