Coyote Vs ACME ★★★★★

Released: 21 August 2026

Director: Dave Green

Starring: Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena

Wile E. Coyote is perhaps cinema’s pre-eminent loser. Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese’s silent parody of rival studio MGM’s successful Tom & Jerry series starred in 40 theatrically-released animated shorts in which he used his cunning mind, often with the help of many ACME-branded products, to try and catch the Road Runner. Invariably, these schemes would fail in various logic-defying slapstick ways. But no matter how badly he got squished, pancaked, exploded or pulverized, he would always bounce right back in the next scene or short with another hare-brained scheme in another part of the identikit New Mexico highway desert. In spite of a universe which told him over and over again, in increasingly ridiculous manners, that he could not and would not catch the Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote kept trying. Undeterred, unbroken, forever filled with hope that maybe tomorrow is the day. Forget Jude the Apostle, Wile E. Coyote has a stronger claim to being the patron saint of lost causes.

In that respect, it makes a certain sense to re-fashion him into the lead of a legal thriller. A genre which too centres the losers and underdogs of their world, trying against all sense and signs to wring some semblance of justice on all-powerful figures for whom the system has bent over backwards to shield from consequences. Such is the premise for director Dave Green and screenwriter Samy Burch’s Coyote vs. ACME as Wile, at his wit’s end and inspired by a TV commercial from small-time ambulance-chasing attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte), sues the ACME corporation for their decades of defective products and, in the process, stumbles into a far-reaching conspiracy against all of Tune-kind.

It also makes a certain sense that this would be the film to undergo a nigh-Sisyphean effort to be released. Infamously written off by post-Warner Discovery merger head David Zaslav for tax purposes despite being finished and positively received, spending several years in limbo as Warner repeatedly rejected offers from other studios to take the film off their hands, and on the verge of being outright deleted. And yet, despite every signal from our universe that this was not meant to happen, the filmmakers and Looney Tunes fans online never stopped trying until, finally, somebody – Ketchup Entertainment, to be exact – swooped in to give Coyote vs. ACME the theatrical release it deserves. This is the kind of feel-good story that we don’t get a lot of in the industry nowadays and, admittedly, makes one innately want to be kinder than they might’ve been to the film in question. It exists for people to see and that is, in its own way, enough.

But Coyote vs. ACME does not need any caveats or lowered expectations. Fact is if the film did have a standard journey to cinemas, it would still be absolutely brilliant. It would still be the best Looney Tunes film ever made. It would still be a deserving successor to Robert Zemeckis’ medium-defining classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And it would still be one of the very best films of 2026. An utterly hilarious, consistently clever, and surprisingly moving ode to the art of slapstick comedy, the history of the Looney Tunes, and the losers and triers of the world.

The Roger Rabbit comparison is not one made lightly, either. There have been many attempts in the years since to try and draft off of the magic from Zemeckis and animation director Richard Williams’ masterpiece. The Looney Tunes have tried three different times themselves – 1995’s Space Jam, 2003’s Back in Action, and 2021’s abominable Space Jam: A New Legacy – and came up woefully short on each attempt. The Tunes almost always playing second-fiddle in works that felt like brand extension ventures rather than proper movies, stuck in an awkward no man’s land of not really working as the genre films they’re semi-sending up yet not truly capturing the Looney essence of the Tunes either.

Coyote vs. ACME does not have this problem. Whilst Green’s direction is more comfortable with the cartoony slapstick than fully aping the look of the genre, the film genuinely works as a solid legal thriller with tantalising mysteries, inspiring speeches, and detestable villains. Burch’s screenplay is a tale of corporate malfeasance, governmental corruption, and the question of whom in the eyes of the law gets to be considered a person worthy of inalienable rights and whom is just a guinea pig for the benefit of the protected class. The real-world historical parallels aren’t hard to miss, adding thematic depth for those who wish to search for it, but crucially aren’t belaboured too hard. Burch understands that, in a film like this, you take the world seriously up to a point but you don’t overthink it. Push the setting as far as is needed to work and not an inch further. Make the point, but don’t pretend that seeing a person get whacked upside the head by a pair of rotating boxing gloves isn’t also inherently funny. It’s a fine line to dance along and the film does Fred Astaire numbers on it.

This balance extends to its treatment of the human cast who aren’t exactly straight men but do understand, on the page and in the performances, that they should play second-fiddle to the Tunes. Everyone is fully committed – Will Forte is on career-best form, expertly balancing the dramatic heart of the movie with great comic exasperation, whilst John Cena as ACME’s hotshot jock lawyer Buddy Crane is maybe the finest use of his screen persona to date – but they’re not trying to dominate the film or turn it into something it’s not (see: Jenna Elfman in Back in Action). They are the baseline, the match paper for the chaotic spirit of the Looney Tunes to spark against. Where The Day the Earth Blew Up (another Ketchup Entertainment-rescued Looney movie) was the first non-short Tune media to successfully translate the anarchic spirit into a different format, Coyote vs. ACME proves you can tamp down the anarchy into a more conventional narrative and still keep the unique feel of those shorts and these characters.

For as silly and broad as the slapstick of classic Looney Tunes shorts could be, they were equally as often slyly clever, basing gags just as much around wordplay and medium awareness as they would pure absurdism. Coyote vs. ACME has plenty of that, sequences of Buddy and Tweety running through every permutation of “tawt I taw” or Kevin arguing that Wile chasing the Road Runner all day does constitute a job “under the precedent set by Sylvester vs. Gonzalez.” It’s also smart about how it utilises every Tune. Prior live-action/animation movies would find themselves often having to awkwardly contort either the characterisations of the Tunes or the plot itself in order to make a character’s appearance work. Coyote never has to tie itself up in such knots. Whether they’re the main protagonists, an important side character or just a quick cameo for a great gag, real thought has been put into which Tune would work best in what role. Granny as the paranoid wife of a disappeared scientist, Bugs as the story’s Deep Throat equivalent, Gossamer as a process server; these appearances are natural fits for the story and the jokes whilst never coming off as cheap fanservice. At their absolute best, and without wishing to spoil, Burch’s screenplay even manages to recontextualise certain character relationships in surprisingly moving and unforced ways.

There are the flecks of flaws, if I must nitpick one of the most joyous cinema experiences I’ve had in a long time. The 3D animation by DNEG is mostly great. There’s a slight adjustment period, but the animation studio and cinematographer Brandon Trost by and large know how to work the characters fluidly into a scene without them feeling like they’re pasted in. But there are a handful of angles at times where things can look a little off, a little uncanny or too rounded, mostly pertaining to Foghorn Leghorn as ACME’s CEO. Aside from the female characters by Candi Milo and one I don’t want to spoil reprised by Jim Cummings, all of the Tunes are voiced by Eric Bauza and that does mean, as in The Day the Earth Blew Up, there can be some vocal overlap or the odd character who doesn’t sound quite right given these are some of the most iconic cartoon voices ever. And in the finale, the famous archival Paul Julian “meep meep”s for Road Runner are swapped out for new Bauza records which make narrative and thematic sense but do jar given that they sound nothing like Julian’s whatsoever.

But that all really is the textbook definition of nitpicking. Fact of the matter is that Coyote vs. ACME is an utter triumph. A film which has repaid the love of the people who campaigned tirelessly to save it with a whip-smart, heartfelt, and surprisingly timely ode to cartoons. A movie that adores the Looney Tunes just as much as it adores a good falling piano gag and just as much as it adores the people of this world who will fling themselves into a gorge over and over again because they believe that, this time, they’ll make it to the other side. Today, at least, Wile E. Coyote gets to win.