‘Coyote vs. Acme’ proves some things are worth fighting for

“Maybe tomorrow.”

Those two words arrive at the very end of Coyote vs. Acme, during the film’s text-crawl epilogue. After everything Wile E. Coyote has endured, audiences are informed that he still hasn’t managed to catch the Road Runner. But, the film adds, “maybe tomorrow.” It is a wonderfully simple final joke that brings the entire message of the movie full circle. Failure isn’t necessarily the end of something. Sometimes it just means getting up and trying again tomorrow.

This month saw the long-awaited release of Ketchup Entertainment’s Coyote vs. Acme, the Looney Tunes courtroom comedy that, for several years, seemed destined to become one of Hollywood’s great “what ifs.”

The film was infamously shelved by its original studio, Warner Bros., in 2023 as part of a tax write-off strategy, despite having essentially been completed. The decision sparked an extraordinary backlash, with fans, filmmakers, writers and animators decrying the move and calling for Warner Bros. to allow the film to be released.
That Coyote vs. Acme eventually saw the light of day through independent distributor Ketchup Entertainment feels like a minor miracle in itself. But through all the controversy, heartache and studio turmoil, one lingering question remained: Was the movie actually any good? Was all of this worth it?

The answer is unequivocally yes. Coyote vs. Acme is fantastic.

Warner Bros.’ Looney Tunes were a pop-culture monolith for much of the mid-20th century, introducing generations to larger-than-life characters including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, Wile E. Coyote and countless others. Their popularity ebbed and flowed over the decades before Warner Bros. brought them roaring back into the mainstream with 1996’s Space Jam. The live-action/animation hybrid took full advantage of white-hot basketball superstar Michael Jordan and became a ’90s pop-culture phenomenon unto itself.
That success led to another celebrated run for the characters, though Warner Bros.’ attempt to make lightning strike twice with 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action — swapping basketball culture for Hollywood satire and enlisting Brendan Fraser and Steve Martin — produced more middling results. The Tunes continued bouncing in and out of cultural relevance until the pandemic era, when a LeBron James-fronted Space Jam sequel came and went without recapturing the magic of its predecessor.

More recently, Warner Bros. went back to basics. The fully animated The Day the Earth Blew Up offered Daffy Duck and Porky Pig a feature-length adventure, while classic shorts and newer productions have continued introducing the characters to modern audiences. Now, with Coyote vs. Acme, these staples of American animation feel refreshed, renewed and, most importantly, as entertaining as ever.

The film follows Wile E. Coyote, who has finally had enough. After spending years purchasing increasingly ridiculous ACME products in his never-ending quest to capture the Road Runner- products that invariably explode, malfunction, collapse, backfire or otherwise inflict catastrophic bodily harm upon him- Coyote decides to do something unprecedented.
He gets a lawyer.

That lawyer is Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a disheveled billboard attorney whose struggling practice specializes in representing cartoon characters injured in comical accidents. Coyote’s case puts Kevin up against ACME’s formidable legal department, spearheaded by Buddy Crane (John Cena, having an absolute blast), Kevin’s former Harvard Law classmate and seemingly everything Kevin himself failed to become.

What begins as one coyote’s product-liability complaint quickly becomes something much larger. Kevin and Coyote encounter familiar Looney Tunes faces while uncovering an increasingly sinister conspiracy, eventually taking their fight from the courts of New Mexico all the way to Capitol Hill.

The real-world parallels are now impossible to miss. There is something almost cosmically funny about watching a movie in which Wile E. Coyote battles an enormous corporation that treats cartoon characters as disposable assets after the movie itself was nearly erased by an enormous corporation that treated a completed work by hundreds of artists as a disposable asset.

But director Dave Green and writer Samy Burch’s Coyote vs. Acme is much more than a laugh-out-loud legal comedy. At its heart, it is a movie about failure.
More specifically, it is a triumphant movie about what comes after failure.

It is about resilience. About trying again when common sense tells you to quit. About refusing to let the possibility of losing become an excuse for never attempting anything at all. And, perhaps most sweetly, it is about the people who are quietly rooting for us: the people watching from the sidelines, wanting us to succeed and counting our victories as if they were their own.

That is where the pairing of Wile E. Coyote and Kevin becomes brilliant. The similarities between them are obvious. Both are perpetual losers. Both have endured failure after failure after failure.

There is, however, one crucial difference.

Kevin has given up.

He had dreams once. He went to Harvard Law. He had talent, ambition and an entire future laid out before him. Then life happened, as it tends to do.
Now he lives in a rundown motel because it is cheaper than buying a house. His socks are threadbare. He rotates between the same handful of dirty suits. He takes whatever cases come through the door and accepts whatever meager settlements ACME offers his clients.

He doesn’t expect to win anymore.

His niece Paige (Lana Condor) couldn’t be more different. Chasing legal dreams of her own, Paige chooses to intern at Kevin’s shabby little practice despite having better opportunities available to her. She does it for a simple reason: she believes in him, even when Kevin no longer believes in himself.

Kevin initially dismisses Coyote’s desire to take ACME to court, expecting the company to offer another small settlement over a defective pair of rocket boots.
Except it isn’t just the rocket boots.

Everything is defective.

Coyote doesn’t want another settlement. With Paige’s help, every failed ACME contraption — essentially the company’s entire catalog of products that have maimed, flattened, exploded, crushed and humiliated him for decades — becomes evidence.

Kevin’s tiny case isn’t tiny anymore. It is the kind of career-defining lawsuit most attorneys could only dream about.
Kevin sees it differently.

To him, it is simply a bigger opportunity to fail.

How could he possibly compete against Cena’s towering, immaculately put-together Buddy Crane? How could the guy in the dirty suit and threadbare socks defeat the man who seemingly became everything Kevin was supposed to be?

And that’s when the movie reveals why Wile E. Coyote is exactly the character Kevin needs.

Because Coyote has been failing for generations. He has been smashed into cliffs. Blown up by dynamite. Flattened by boulders. Launched from malfunctioning rockets. Dropped from impossible heights.

And every single time, he gets back up.

Wile E. Coyote doesn’t see failure as a reason to stop. He sees it as another chance to try.
That remarkably simple idea gives Coyote vs. Acme an emotional center I never expected from a movie built around one of animation’s most famously abused slapstick characters.
The journey brings Kevin and Coyote into contact with an institutionalized Daffy Duck, a Deep Throat-esque Bugs Bunny, a blackmailed Tweety Bird and the nefarious head of ACME, Foghorn Leghorn. The conspiracy at the center of the case involves ACME testing its dangerous products on Toons- Foghorn’s own kind- to work out the kinks before eventually selling those products to humans.

Naturally, everything eventually leads to Washington, D.C., and the grand stage of a congressional hearing.

It is there that Coyote vs. Acme delivers what may be one of the most unexpected emotional gut punches I’ve experienced in a theater this year.

The Road Runner comes to testify on Coyote’s behalf.

For decades, we have understood their relationship from Coyote’s perspective. He wants to catch the Road Runner. Presumably, he wants to eat him. Every chase is another attempt to finally accomplish that goal.

Except the Road Runner never saw it that way. He never understood what Coyote was actually trying to do. To him, this was all one enormous game of chase.
More importantly, Wile E. Coyote was his friend. The realization transforms one of animation’s longest-running jokes into something unexpectedly tender. Unable to communicate beyond his familiar “beeps,” Road Runner instead speaks to Coyote through painted signs.

“Are you coming back?”

Coyote assures him that he is.

For a movie in which a cartoon coyote hires Will Forte to sue the manufacturer of his malfunctioning rocket boots, it has absolutely no business hitting as hard as it does.
And yet it works.

The congressional hearing ultimately ends in failure. Kevin is offered a last-minute bribe from ACME- more money than he has probably ever seen- if he simply walks away.
The Kevin we met at the beginning of the movie probably would have taken it.

This Kevin refuses. Somewhere along the way, he stopped being content with rolling over, taking the settlement and waiting for his next loss. He has seen what ACME has done to these characters. He has seen Paige refuse to stop believing in him. Most importantly, he has spent enough time beside Wile E. Coyote to understand that losing and failing are not the same thing. Kevin loses the hearing.

But he doesn’t quit.
When he returns to Albuquerque, a crowd of Toons is waiting outside his law office. They want representation against ACME. The mounting allegations, in turn, trigger a federal investigation into the company. Kevin didn’t get the victory he imagined. He got something better. He got another tomorrow.

Coyote eventually says farewell to Kevin and returns to the desert, where Road Runner is waiting. The two are ecstatic to see one another.
Then, as they have for generations, they tear across the desert in another ridiculous chase.

Coyote is right back where he started.

Except now we understand that isn’t tragic. That’s the victory.

He gets flattened. He fails. He gets up. He tries again.

Coyote vs. Acme is an unexpectedly wholesome, deeply funny movie about refusing to surrender to defeat. Its message about perseverance never feels cynical or manufactured because it comes from a character who has spent nearly 80 years demonstrating exactly what perseverance looks like.

The slapstick is broad and clean enough for children, while adults will find plenty to enjoy in the legal satire, corporate absurdity and nostalgic appearances from characters many of us grew up watching across countless different iterations.

And somehow, against all odds, the story of the film itself makes its message even more powerful.

Coyote vs. Acme was declared finished. Written off. Shelved. For years, audiences were told they would probably never see it.
Then somebody tried again. And here it is.

Which brings us back to those final moments.

After the story is over, the film’s text-crawl epilogue tells us what became of its characters. And when it comes to Wile E. Coyote, after everything he endured, after everything he learned and after all those years of trying, one thing apparently hasn’t changed:

He still hasn’t caught the Road Runner.

“Maybe tomorrow.”

There could hardly be a more perfect ending.

Because Coyote vs. Acme was never really about whether Wile E. Coyote finally catches the Road Runner. It is about why he keeps chasing him when every previous attempt has ended in spectacular failure. It is about Kevin finding the courage to try again. It is about artists refusing to accept that their work would never be seen. It is about a movie that was itself written off and nevertheless found its way onto a screen.

Sometimes you win. Sometimes you get flattened by a boulder.

Either way, there’s another day to get back up and try again.

Coyote vs. Acme has unexpectedly become one of my favorite movies of the year.

And if it doesn’t become one of yours?

Well...
Maybe tomorrow.