The first trailer for the almost-deleted Coyote vs. Acme looks good as hell

After surviving an attempted deletion by David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery, like a toon escaping Judge Doom’s dip, Coyote vs. Acme has a release date (August 28) and, finally, a trailer. And guess what? It looks good as hell!

Having grown up on Looney Tunes, I am all in on Looney Tunes, all the time, but I am especially into the new distributor, Ketchup Entertainment, acknowledging this film’s unique situation having been rescued from the tax write-off pyre. The opening title card lists Warner Bros. Discovery as “a wholly owned subsidiary of The Acme Corporation”, and Foghorn Leghorn’s voiceover at the end states, “The Acme Corporation is releasing this film for accounts purposes only, we do not condone any of the storylines depicted.” Pretty funny when you consider WBD tried to sh-tcan the movie for a write off.

As for the trailer itself, we see Wile E. Coyote getting bamboozled yet again by a faulty Acme product, as well as the crusade of attorney Kevin Avery to wring personal injury settlements out of Acme, with the help of his niece, played by Lana Condor. Coyote and Kevin team up to sue Acme, of which John Cena is the smarmy corporate lawyer, and from there, it looks like Acme is up to some shady business they’re trying to bury. The vibes are distinctly anti-corporate, gee, I wonder if that factored into WBD’s decision to try to bury this movie?

There is a Who Framed Roger Rabbit? vibe which is unavoidable given the combination of live action and animation, though Coyote looks incredibly polished in a way Roger Rabbit does not (though the effects in that film hold up amazingly well and it still looks great nearly 40 years later). And much like Roger Rabbit, there is an assumption that any world occupied by humans and toons both would be inherently chaotic, which is very fun. Though unlike Roger Rabbit, Coyote looks more family friendly overall.

Which is why the whole “delete for tax purposes” thing never made any sense, and seeing this trailer now, it REALLY doesn’t make sense. This is a film with a sub-$100 million budget, it features the Looney Tunes, an inter-generationally popular entertainment brand, and Coyote vs. Acme looks cute and fun and FAMILY FRIENDLY. Family films don’t even have to be good to make money; between a responsible budget and actually looking like a good movie, Coyote vs. Acme is a no-brainer. The idea that this movie could not have made money for WBD is, frankly, insane—especially when they released The Flash, a massively expensive film which lost them a historic amount of money. If the tax write-off scheme was really just about the bottom line, the cheap family film is not the one you bury, between those two films. Just saying.

I am glad that Coyote vs. Acme has a chance to find an audience. I don’t expect it to put up Super Mario numbers, but I hope after all this, Coyote comes out on top at long last. It would be the happiest ending possible for the film and the Looney Tunes at large—David Zaslav has a weird anti-toon vendetta, are we sure he ISN’T Judge Doom?—to find success for someone other than f-cking Warner Bros. Discovery. They bought schmuck insurance on this one, and I hope they pay the highest possible premium for it.