Coyote vs. Acme Review: A Scrappy Comedy Triumph

It is hard not to walk into “Coyote vs. Acme” already wanting it to win. The film’s path to release has become part of its identity: Warner Bros. scrapped a completed movie in pursuit of a $30 million tax write-off, despite the fact that it was a Looney Tunes project starring John Cena, produced by James Gunn, written by Oscar nominee Samy Burch of “May December,” and reportedly buoyed by strong test-audience scores. If executives truly believed they could not earn at least that much from those ingredients, it says less about the movie than it does about the studio’s judgment when it comes to family entertainment and animation.

After more than a year of public frustration, industry outrage, and fan-led protest, the film was unexpectedly saved when Ketchup Entertainment acquired the rights. The independent distributor had already handled the U.S. release of another nearly shelved Looney Tunes feature, “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.” Now, with Warner Bros. approaching a potentially Hollywood-shaking merger with Paramount, “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally headed to theaters — and if there is any justice, it will become the summer’s most satisfying surprise hit on spite alone.

The good news is that the movie itself earns the noise around it. Judged purely by laughs per minute, “Coyote vs. Acme” is the funniest film of 2026 so far. “The Invite” comes close and may ultimately stand as the year’s strongest comedy overall, but even that film has to slow down for its heavier dramatic beats. This one operates in classic Looney Tunes mode, where even supposedly sincere drama remains funny by design — the same spirit that made Elmer Fudd finally getting the wabbit in “What’s Opera, Doc?” both grand and absurd. The movie’s real-world survival story also gives extra bite to its ideas about persistence and its jabs at corporate power. It is not flawless, but when it clicks, it feels like the work of a true super genius.

Dedicated Looney Tunes fans will know early on that “Coyote vs. Acme” understands the assignment when Dr. Lorre appears among the first characters on screen. Voiced by Eric Bauza, as are nearly all of the film’s animated characters, the cameo is the kind of deep-cut reference that nods to 1930s movie-star parodies most children today would never recognize. The opening sequence sets the tone beautifully, using defective cartoon inventions in real-world spaces as the doctor attempts to flee an Acme factory and reveal the company’s sinister secrets, only to end up trapped in a portable hole. If that does not get you laughing, the next title card probably will: “Based on a true story.”

Turning a formula built for seven-minute shorts into a feature-length story has long been the challenge facing Looney Tunes movies, but “Coyote vs. Acme” finds a smart balance between reverence and expansion. The film gives audiences the familiar pleasures of Wile E. Coyote’s endless, doomed attempts to catch the Road Runner, and those gags still land. Around them, it builds a larger plot in which the Coyote takes legal action against the company responsible for so much of his suffering, uncovering a sprawling cartoon conspiracy in the process. Chuck Jones’ famous rules for Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner shorts are mostly honored; the climax bends a few and breaks at least one outright, but the movie does so knowingly, temporarily, and with enough wit to justify it — especially since Jones himself was never above breaking his own rules when inspiration struck.

Jones, his writer Mike Maltese, and fellow Looney Tunes director Tex Avery are paid homage to via the “Avery, Jones, & Maltese” cartoon law firm Wile E. drags into the suit. Lawyer Fred Avery (Will Forte) is used to settling every suit and unhappily dragged by his client into a major case, but his niece Paige (Lana Condor) thinks there’s something to investigate with Acme — a company that, in this universe, makes high-end products for humans alongside its more questionable cartoon technology. All the human actors know exactly what they’re doing alongside their animated co-stars, with Forte carrying the film’s story arc and message. But it’s John Cena who completely steals the show as Acme’s defense lawyer Buddy Crane. He pretty much is a cartoon (and Buddy does shares a name with the crappiest Looney Tunes character …), charming the pants off the court with absurd displays of patriotism and putting his full menace into threatening Tweety Bird over whether he actually taw what he tawt he taw. Somebody cast this giant man as the human lead in a Muppet movie!

To say that “Coyote vs. Acme” is the best cartoon-characters-in-the-real-world movie since “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is both 100% correct and also not that huge a compliment, considering “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” is a perfect movie and everything else in the genre ranges from mixed bag to trash. It’s impressive how close “Coyote vs. Acme” gets to “Roger Rabbit,” though. Director Dave Green understands that the success of “Roger Rabbit” is that it works as both a cartoon comedy and a film noir, trying to do the same by balancing Looney Tunes with legal drama (press notes cite “The Insider” as inspiration; the Albuquerque setting and disreputable characters call to mind “Better Call Saul”).

Two issues hold “Coyote vs. Acme” back from “Roger Rabbit” greatness, however. The first is the animation. “Roger Rabbit” spent a record-breaking budget on blending hand-drawn animation directed by notorious perfectionist Richard Williams into live-action. “Coyote vs. Acme” uses a mix of more limited 2D animation with CGI imitating hand-drawn aesthetics, and while the interaction with the live-action backgrounds is spectacular, the animation itself’s a mixed bag. The Coyote is the best-realized of the 3D characters, but lesser characters have a bit more of a stiffness to them. If you combined the exceptional gag writing of “Coyote vs. Acme” with the expressive animation of “The Day The Earth Blew Up,” then you’d have an unbeatable Looney Tunes movie.

The other issue is the stakes. Where “Roger Rabbit” created serious danger for cartoons who recover easily from slapstick accidents, “Coyote vs. Acme” is less successful in making such slapstick itself the danger. When Foghorn Leghorn defends Acme’s brutality in congress, his defense makes more sense than a villain’s probably should. The central conspiracy’s very funny, but not completely coherent dramatically, especially when certain characters’ psychologies have us questioning whether to even care about the case. But those same psychologies do give us something else to care about, and without getting into spoilers, what the movie does with those concerns is genius.

“Coyote vs. Acme” opens in theaters on August 28.