Early in November 2023, the night before Warner Bros. Discovery announced its decision to scrap “Coyote vs. Acme,” opting instead to take a $30-million tax write-off on the hybrid live-action-animation film, actor Will Forte received enthusiastic news about the project.
“I got a call from the producers saying they were ready to show us the movie, and they were so excited, and it was testing really well,” Forte, 56, recalls during a recent interview in Century City. “It was the very next day that we got the call that it was getting shelved.”
Six days after that devastating blow to their collective morale, the cast and crew attended a “funeral screening” on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to watch the film they’d worked on for the first time, one that, presumably, the public would never get to see.
“In those six days, my brain was trying to make sense of it, and I felt like: It must not be very good then,” Forte explains with a doubtful expression. Reclining on an office chair on a hot July afternoon, the former “SNL” star appears pensive thinking back on that upheaval.
“ ‘Maybe these guys just lost their heads a little bit,’ ” Forte says, speaking from the perspective of the deciders. “ ‘They were too close to it. They had been working on it so long that they fell in love with this thing that just is not as good as they thought.’ ”
But, as he would learn at the screening, the execs at WB were wrong. “We went in and watched the movie and it was fantastic.”
Will Forte advises a new client in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
Forte continues, “All this confusion and frustration turned to a lot of anger. I worked through a lot of stuff over the course of a couple months. And then eventually it was just like: It’s not healthy for me to feel these feelings. I just gotta let it go.”
Thankfully, public outcry and a scrappy indie distributor saved “Coyote vs. Acme” from oblivion after Warner Bros. allowed its makers to shop the movie around.
Last year, Ketchup Entertainment bought the picture from Warner Bros. for an estimated $50 million (the movie reportedly cost $70 million to produce), and “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally coming to theaters nationwide this Friday.
“I had resigned myself at the time that this movie might take 30 years to get out of the vault,” screenwriter Samy Burch says on a video call. “I’m really happy that Ketchup saved it and now it’s going to be out there forever and no one can stop it.”
Forte plays Kevin Avery, a downcast injury lawyer living in Albuquerque who begrudgingly accepts a new client, the tenacious Wile E. Coyote, in a trial against the Acme Corp. The desert-dwelling, nonverbal cartoon character is suing the company for all the injuries its products have caused him in his pursuit of his would-be dinner, the Roadrunner.
Will Forte. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
The gag-filled comedy overflows with wackiness, as is customary for “Looney Tunes,” but also, and perhaps less expectedly, poignancy galore.
Even after Warner Bros. uttered a seemingly decisive “That’s all folks” in regard to the movie, director Dave Green believed the production’s quality would ultimately save it.
“There was always a flicker of hope, and I don’t think we ever gave up on that,” says a soft-spoken Green, 43, sitting next to Forte. “Something I told people on our crew was, ‘Forever is a really long time.’ I always felt like at some point the movie had to eventually be seen on the grand spectrum of time.”
Warner Bros., he says, didn’t provide much of an explanation for its machinations. “It was a very brief conversation,” he recalls. “They just said that their strategy had changed.”
During the time when the future of “Coyote vs. Acme” was uncertain, Green recalls feeling grateful for the mere fact that he and his collaborators were allowed to make such a singular film: a courtroom drama and animated comedy starring “Looney Tunes” characters.
“That in its own way is kind of an impossibility,” Green says. “Even though we never knew if audiences would see it or when they would see it, it felt like the win was getting to make this movie in the way we wanted to make it in the first place.”
Director Dave Green. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Taking its title and core premise from Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece published in the New Yorker magazine (written in persuasive legalese and formatted like the actual opening statement of a trial), “Coyote vs. Acme” had been floating around Hollywood for decades. At some point, “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn and screenwriter Jeremy Slater spearheaded it.
“I was brought to the project through the New Yorker short story and first had interest in making it back in the late ’90s when I first came to L.A,” Gunn tells The Times via email. “Unlike most ‘story by’ credits, I didn’t write a screenplay. I simply wrote the story for the film that would be a buddy comedy about Wile E. and a personal injury lawyer and tried to bring some heart as well as humor into it.”
Gunn, who shares a producer credit with Chris DeFaria, operated from sincere adoration for the characters, in particular the tireless protagonist. “I’ve always liked Wile E. — he has always been my favorite ‘Looney Tunes’ character,” he says. “So even though, like most people, I rooted for Roadrunner in their adventures, I still had a lot of empathy for him.”
In 2020, with Green attached to direct, the project underwent a reset, which included bringing in screenwriter Samy Burch, a future Oscar nominee for her already penned “May December” script. Their approach hinged on leaning into Frazier’s deadpan tone and taking the concept more seriously.
Searing courtroom dramas like “The Verdict,” “Dark Waters,” “The Insider,” “A Few Good Men” and “Erin Brockovich” all went into “the sauce” of the project, Green says. “These are all movies that are about the little guy facing some element of unfairness and wanting justice. That’s really at the core of this movie and Wile E.’s fight.”
Those other movies don’t have “Looney Tunes,” though.
“Samy and I were always laughing, like, ‘If you just put Foghorn Leghorn into this one scene from ‘The Verdict,’ it would be hilarious,’” Green says.
John Cena has a laugh with Foghorn Leghorn in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
On top of those hard-hitting trial movies, Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the classic live-action-animation hybrid film, served as a substantial source of inspiration. A direct parody of 1974’s “Chinatown,” it’s a technical marvel, especially for its time, one that fully commits to the zaniness of its hand-drawn protagonist.
“It’s a film noir that is also starring cartoon characters, and it’s got this collision of tones,” Green says of Zemeckis’ landmark, a movie that somehow bridges bonk-on-the-head mania with a voluptuous femme fatale. “On the one hand it’s very dark. On the other hand, it’s very silly and stupid even. That mash-up is really entertaining to me. When your comedy is grounded by darkness and stakes, it just makes the comedy funnier.”
The vast archive of Wile E. Coyote cartoons, dating back to the 1949 short “Fast and Furry-ous” directed by the legendary animator Chuck Jones, was also fundamental to their understanding of the comedic timing of the “Looney Tunes” world — and to who this coyote is as a character. Though some might think of Wile E. as a villain just trying to kill and eat the Roadrunner, Green considers him an eternal optimist.
“Every time he fails, he just picks himself up and tries again,” Green says. “There’s something definitely deep and inspiring about that. And the more we started to study the character, the more we understood his depth.”
On set, Wile E. shared space with Forte via a life-size puppet operated by acclaimed puppeteer David Barclay (who also manipulated Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi”). Before shooting started, Green’s team had a full plan for what all of the animated characters would be doing and which objects they would interact with in every scene.
“It took a lot of trust for someone like Will to be in this movie because he had to believe that this magic trick would eventually work and that these characters would eventually show up on screen and be his scene partners,” Green says. He describes the process of making “Coyote” as “taking a Polaroid that takes two or three years to develop.”
While some iterations of a speaking Wile E. Coyote have existed, Green and Burch agreed early on that their version would communicate only using signs.
“We felt the speaking version of the character was weird and disturbing and the voice never completely even matched what I thought Wile E. would sound like,” Green says. “To us, the most memorable version of the character was the one that was like a silent film actor.”
“Wile E. is easy to feel for,” Burch adds. “There’s a lot of want and desire in him. I looked at some Charlie Chaplin films and other films where one character doesn’t speak and tried to keep him very present on the page.”
His relentless drive notwithstanding, the animated Wile E. in “Coyote vs. Acme” undergoes a transformative evolution through his friendship with Forte’s Kevin, as they band against a seemingly insurmountable adversary, represented by Acme’s CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza) and his menacing lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena).
By the end of the trial, you may not expect how moving the picture is. “You’re feeling this emotion for this character who hasn’t talked the entire movie and who’s trying to kill this bird — I was very surprised,” Forte says. “My wife was crying.”
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says director Dave Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Considering the tribulations “Coyote vs. Acme” has overcome to finally reach theaters, it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what’s on screen and what transpired between the filmmakers and Warner Bros. (The studio reportedly rejected several offers from other companies interested in buying the film.)
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
Forte adds, “You can’t help but talk about David versus Goliath when talking about the journey that the characters take, and then you can just say the exact same thing about the journey the movie’s taking.”
Two other Warner Bros. movies, “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” and “Batgirl,” were written off when almost completed, but as of now, no one has come to their rescue.
“We were a random sacrifice,” says Burch. “We didn’t see it coming at all. That was the real relatable thing to Wile E. We really felt like we were following the plan and then something came out of the sky.”
The Looney Tunes are just too beloved to be locked away. They’ve endured for decades because their sharp sarcasm and clever comedy, whether physical or otherwise, still lands. Burch recalls test-screening reactions from young viewers, some of whom had never seen the original cartoons.
“They would ask the kids, ‘Do you know Bugs Bunny or the Looney Tunes?’ And sometimes the kids would say no, and that wouldn’t affect how they liked this movie or how they felt for Coyote and Roadrunner,” says Burch. “Hopefully this will be an entry point to some kids and then they can go back and catch up on the last 100 years.”
Green believes everyone who worked on “Coyote” surpassed expectations, not only because they trusted the screenplay and his vision, but out of their love for the Looney Tunes.
“People were feeling like they owed it to these characters to deliver for them,” he says. “They really are legacy characters.”
But not everything is whimsy and laughs when working with timeless cartoon stars. One of them, Green says, tends to steal the spotlight.
“Bugs is very difficult because he always has to be right and he is a trickster,” Green says. “He has movie star energy and, in a movie where we’re really trying to make a story about Wile E. Coyote first and foremost, anytime Bugs is mentioned or is in a scene, he has this electrifying force.”
“He’s a major problem,” Green adds solemnly, before cracking the slightest smile.
Owners may come and go, but that wascally wabbit stays.
Early in November 2023, the night before Warner Bros. Discovery announced its decision to scrap “Coyote vs. Acme,” opting instead to take a $30-million tax write-off on the hybrid live-action-animation film, actor Will Forte received enthusiastic news about the project.
“I got a call from the producers saying they were ready to show us the movie, and they were so excited, and it was testing really well,” Forte, 56, recalls during a recent interview in Century City. “It was the very next day that we got the call that it was getting shelved.”
Six days after that devastating blow to their collective morale, the cast and crew attended a “funeral screening” on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to watch the film they’d worked on for the first time, one that, presumably, the public would never get to see.
“In those six days, my brain was trying to make sense of it, and I felt like: It must not be very good then,” Forte explains with a doubtful expression. Reclining on an office chair on a hot July afternoon, the former “SNL” star appears pensive thinking back on that upheaval.
“ ‘Maybe these guys just lost their heads a little bit,’ ” Forte says, speaking from the perspective of the deciders. “ ‘They were too close to it. They had been working on it so long that they fell in love with this thing that just is not as good as they thought.’ ”
But, as he would learn at the screening, the execs at WB were wrong. “We went in and watched the movie and it was fantastic.”
Will Forte advises a new client in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
Forte continues, “All this confusion and frustration turned to a lot of anger. I worked through a lot of stuff over the course of a couple months. And then eventually it was just like: It’s not healthy for me to feel these feelings. I just gotta let it go.”
Thankfully, public outcry and a scrappy indie distributor saved “Coyote vs. Acme” from oblivion after Warner Bros. allowed its makers to shop the movie around.
Last year, Ketchup Entertainment bought the picture from Warner Bros. for an estimated $50 million (the movie reportedly cost $70 million to produce), and “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally coming to theaters nationwide this Friday.
“I had resigned myself at the time that this movie might take 30 years to get out of the vault,” screenwriter Samy Burch says on a video call. “I’m really happy that Ketchup saved it and now it’s going to be out there forever and no one can stop it.”
Forte plays Kevin Avery, a downcast injury lawyer living in Albuquerque who begrudgingly accepts a new client, the tenacious Wile E. Coyote, in a trial against the Acme Corp. The desert-dwelling, nonverbal cartoon character is suing the company for all the injuries its products have caused him in his pursuit of his would-be dinner, the Roadrunner.
Will Forte. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
The gag-filled comedy overflows with wackiness, as is customary for “Looney Tunes,” but also, and perhaps less expectedly, poignancy galore.
Even after Warner Bros. uttered a seemingly decisive “That’s all folks” in regard to the movie, director Dave Green believed the production’s quality would ultimately save it.
“There was always a flicker of hope, and I don’t think we ever gave up on that,” says a soft-spoken Green, 43, sitting next to Forte. “Something I told people on our crew was, ‘Forever is a really long time.’ I always felt like at some point the movie had to eventually be seen on the grand spectrum of time.”
Warner Bros., he says, didn’t provide much of an explanation for its machinations. “It was a very brief conversation,” he recalls. “They just said that their strategy had changed.”
During the time when the future of “Coyote vs. Acme” was uncertain, Green recalls feeling grateful for the mere fact that he and his collaborators were allowed to make such a singular film: a courtroom drama and animated comedy starring “Looney Tunes” characters.
“That in its own way is kind of an impossibility,” Green says. “Even though we never knew if audiences would see it or when they would see it, it felt like the win was getting to make this movie in the way we wanted to make it in the first place.”
Director Dave Green. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Taking its title and core premise from Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece published in the New Yorker magazine (written in persuasive legalese and formatted like the actual opening statement of a trial), “Coyote vs. Acme” had been floating around Hollywood for decades. At some point, “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn and screenwriter Jeremy Slater spearheaded it.
“I was brought to the project through the New Yorker short story and first had interest in making it back in the late ’90s when I first came to L.A,” Gunn tells The Times via email. “Unlike most ‘story by’ credits, I didn’t write a screenplay. I simply wrote the story for the film that would be a buddy comedy about Wile E. and a personal injury lawyer and tried to bring some heart as well as humor into it.”
Gunn, who shares a producer credit with Chris DeFaria, operated from sincere adoration for the characters, in particular the tireless protagonist. “I’ve always liked Wile E. — he has always been my favorite ‘Looney Tunes’ character,” he says. “So even though, like most people, I rooted for Roadrunner in their adventures, I still had a lot of empathy for him.”
In 2020, with Green attached to direct, the project underwent a reset, which included bringing in screenwriter Samy Burch, a future Oscar nominee for her already penned “May December” script. Their approach hinged on leaning into Frazier’s deadpan tone and taking the concept more seriously.
Searing courtroom dramas like “The Verdict,” “Dark Waters,” “The Insider,” “A Few Good Men” and “Erin Brockovich” all went into “the sauce” of the project, Green says. “These are all movies that are about the little guy facing some element of unfairness and wanting justice. That’s really at the core of this movie and Wile E.’s fight.”
Those other movies don’t have “Looney Tunes,” though.
“Samy and I were always laughing, like, ‘If you just put Foghorn Leghorn into this one scene from ‘The Verdict,’ it would be hilarious,’” Green says.
John Cena has a laugh with Foghorn Leghorn in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
On top of those hard-hitting trial movies, Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the classic live-action-animation hybrid film, served as a substantial source of inspiration. A direct parody of 1974’s “Chinatown,” it’s a technical marvel, especially for its time, one that fully commits to the zaniness of its hand-drawn protagonist.
“It’s a film noir that is also starring cartoon characters, and it’s got this collision of tones,” Green says of Zemeckis’ landmark, a movie that somehow bridges bonk-on-the-head mania with a voluptuous femme fatale. “On the one hand it’s very dark. On the other hand, it’s very silly and stupid even. That mash-up is really entertaining to me. When your comedy is grounded by darkness and stakes, it just makes the comedy funnier.”
The vast archive of Wile E. Coyote cartoons, dating back to the 1949 short “Fast and Furry-ous” directed by the legendary animator Chuck Jones, was also fundamental to their understanding of the comedic timing of the “Looney Tunes” world — and to who this coyote is as a character. Though some might think of Wile E. as a villain just trying to kill and eat the Roadrunner, Green considers him an eternal optimist.
“Every time he fails, he just picks himself up and tries again,” Green says. “There’s something definitely deep and inspiring about that. And the more we started to study the character, the more we understood his depth.”
On set, Wile E. shared space with Forte via a life-size puppet operated by acclaimed puppeteer David Barclay (who also manipulated Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi”). Before shooting started, Green’s team had a full plan for what all of the animated characters would be doing and which objects they would interact with in every scene.
“It took a lot of trust for someone like Will to be in this movie because he had to believe that this magic trick would eventually work and that these characters would eventually show up on screen and be his scene partners,” Green says. He describes the process of making “Coyote” as “taking a Polaroid that takes two or three years to develop.”
While some iterations of a speaking Wile E. Coyote have existed, Green and Burch agreed early on that their version would communicate only using signs.
“We felt the speaking version of the character was weird and disturbing and the voice never completely even matched what I thought Wile E. would sound like,” Green says. “To us, the most memorable version of the character was the one that was like a silent film actor.”
“Wile E. is easy to feel for,” Burch adds. “There’s a lot of want and desire in him. I looked at some Charlie Chaplin films and other films where one character doesn’t speak and tried to keep him very present on the page.”
His relentless drive notwithstanding, the animated Wile E. in “Coyote vs. Acme” undergoes a transformative evolution through his friendship with Forte’s Kevin, as they band against a seemingly insurmountable adversary, represented by Acme’s CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza) and his menacing lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena).
By the end of the trial, you may not expect how moving the picture is. “You’re feeling this emotion for this character who hasn’t talked the entire movie and who’s trying to kill this bird — I was very surprised,” Forte says. “My wife was crying.”
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says director Dave Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Considering the tribulations “Coyote vs. Acme” has overcome to finally reach theaters, it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what’s on screen and what transpired between the filmmakers and Warner Bros. (The studio reportedly rejected several offers from other companies interested in buying the film.)
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
Forte adds, “You can’t help but talk about David versus Goliath when talking about the journey that the characters take, and then you can just say the exact same thing about the journey the movie’s taking.”
Two other Warner Bros. movies, “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” and “Batgirl,” were written off when almost completed, but as of now, no one has come to their rescue.
“We were a random sacrifice,” says Burch. “We didn’t see it coming at all. That was the real relatable thing to Wile E. We really felt like we were following the plan and then something came out of the sky.”
The Looney Tunes are just too beloved to be locked away. They’ve endured for decades because their sharp sarcasm and clever comedy, whether physical or otherwise, still lands. Burch recalls test-screening reactions from young viewers, some of whom had never seen the original cartoons.
“They would ask the kids, ‘Do you know Bugs Bunny or the Looney Tunes?’ And sometimes the kids would say no, and that wouldn’t affect how they liked this movie or how they felt for Coyote and Roadrunner,” says Burch. “Hopefully this will be an entry point to some kids and then they can go back and catch up on the last 100 years.”
Green believes everyone who worked on “Coyote” surpassed expectations, not only because they trusted the screenplay and his vision, but out of their love for the Looney Tunes.
“People were feeling like they owed it to these characters to deliver for them,” he says. “They really are legacy characters.”
But not everything is whimsy and laughs when working with timeless cartoon stars. One of them, Green says, tends to steal the spotlight.
“Bugs is very difficult because he always has to be right and he is a trickster,” Green says. “He has movie star energy and, in a movie where we’re really trying to make a story about Wile E. Coyote first and foremost, anytime Bugs is mentioned or is in a scene, he has this electrifying force.”
“He’s a major problem,” Green adds solemnly, before cracking the slightest smile.
Owners may come and go, but that wascally wabbit stays.
Early in November 2023, the night before Warner Bros. Discovery announced its decision to scrap “Coyote vs. Acme,” opting instead to take a $30-million tax write-off on the hybrid live-action-animation film, actor Will Forte received enthusiastic news about the project.
“I got a call from the producers saying they were ready to show us the movie, and they were so excited, and it was testing really well,” Forte, 56, recalls during a recent interview in Century City. “It was the very next day that we got the call that it was getting shelved.”
Six days after that devastating blow to their collective morale, the cast and crew attended a “funeral screening” on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to watch the film they’d worked on for the first time, one that, presumably, the public would never get to see.
“In those six days, my brain was trying to make sense of it, and I felt like: It must not be very good then,” Forte explains with a doubtful expression. Reclining on an office chair on a hot July afternoon, the former “SNL” star appears pensive thinking back on that upheaval.
“ ‘Maybe these guys just lost their heads a little bit,’ ” Forte says, speaking from the perspective of the deciders. “ ‘They were too close to it. They had been working on it so long that they fell in love with this thing that just is not as good as they thought.’ ”
But, as he would learn at the screening, the execs at WB were wrong. “We went in and watched the movie and it was fantastic.”
Will Forte advises a new client in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
Forte continues, “All this confusion and frustration turned to a lot of anger. I worked through a lot of stuff over the course of a couple months. And then eventually it was just like: It’s not healthy for me to feel these feelings. I just gotta let it go.”
Thankfully, public outcry and a scrappy indie distributor saved “Coyote vs. Acme” from oblivion after Warner Bros. allowed its makers to shop the movie around.
Last year, Ketchup Entertainment bought the picture from Warner Bros. for an estimated $50 million (the movie reportedly cost $70 million to produce), and “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally coming to theaters nationwide this Friday.
“I had resigned myself at the time that this movie might take 30 years to get out of the vault,” screenwriter Samy Burch says on a video call. “I’m really happy that Ketchup saved it and now it’s going to be out there forever and no one can stop it.”
Forte plays Kevin Avery, a downcast injury lawyer living in Albuquerque who begrudgingly accepts a new client, the tenacious Wile E. Coyote, in a trial against the Acme Corp. The desert-dwelling, nonverbal cartoon character is suing the company for all the injuries its products have caused him in his pursuit of his would-be dinner, the Roadrunner.
Will Forte. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
The gag-filled comedy overflows with wackiness, as is customary for “Looney Tunes,” but also, and perhaps less expectedly, poignancy galore.
Even after Warner Bros. uttered a seemingly decisive “That’s all folks” in regard to the movie, director Dave Green believed the production’s quality would ultimately save it.
“There was always a flicker of hope, and I don’t think we ever gave up on that,” says a soft-spoken Green, 43, sitting next to Forte. “Something I told people on our crew was, ‘Forever is a really long time.’ I always felt like at some point the movie had to eventually be seen on the grand spectrum of time.”
Warner Bros., he says, didn’t provide much of an explanation for its machinations. “It was a very brief conversation,” he recalls. “They just said that their strategy had changed.”
During the time when the future of “Coyote vs. Acme” was uncertain, Green recalls feeling grateful for the mere fact that he and his collaborators were allowed to make such a singular film: a courtroom drama and animated comedy starring “Looney Tunes” characters.
“That in its own way is kind of an impossibility,” Green says. “Even though we never knew if audiences would see it or when they would see it, it felt like the win was getting to make this movie in the way we wanted to make it in the first place.”
Director Dave Green. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Taking its title and core premise from Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece published in the New Yorker magazine (written in persuasive legalese and formatted like the actual opening statement of a trial), “Coyote vs. Acme” had been floating around Hollywood for decades. At some point, “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn and screenwriter Jeremy Slater spearheaded it.
“I was brought to the project through the New Yorker short story and first had interest in making it back in the late ’90s when I first came to L.A,” Gunn tells The Times via email. “Unlike most ‘story by’ credits, I didn’t write a screenplay. I simply wrote the story for the film that would be a buddy comedy about Wile E. and a personal injury lawyer and tried to bring some heart as well as humor into it.”
Gunn, who shares a producer credit with Chris DeFaria, operated from sincere adoration for the characters, in particular the tireless protagonist. “I’ve always liked Wile E. — he has always been my favorite ‘Looney Tunes’ character,” he says. “So even though, like most people, I rooted for Roadrunner in their adventures, I still had a lot of empathy for him.”
In 2020, with Green attached to direct, the project underwent a reset, which included bringing in screenwriter Samy Burch, a future Oscar nominee for her already penned “May December” script. Their approach hinged on leaning into Frazier’s deadpan tone and taking the concept more seriously.
Searing courtroom dramas like “The Verdict,” “Dark Waters,” “The Insider,” “A Few Good Men” and “Erin Brockovich” all went into “the sauce” of the project, Green says. “These are all movies that are about the little guy facing some element of unfairness and wanting justice. That’s really at the core of this movie and Wile E.’s fight.”
Those other movies don’t have “Looney Tunes,” though.
“Samy and I were always laughing, like, ‘If you just put Foghorn Leghorn into this one scene from ‘The Verdict,’ it would be hilarious,’” Green says.
John Cena has a laugh with Foghorn Leghorn in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
On top of those hard-hitting trial movies, Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the classic live-action-animation hybrid film, served as a substantial source of inspiration. A direct parody of 1974’s “Chinatown,” it’s a technical marvel, especially for its time, one that fully commits to the zaniness of its hand-drawn protagonist.
“It’s a film noir that is also starring cartoon characters, and it’s got this collision of tones,” Green says of Zemeckis’ landmark, a movie that somehow bridges bonk-on-the-head mania with a voluptuous femme fatale. “On the one hand it’s very dark. On the other hand, it’s very silly and stupid even. That mash-up is really entertaining to me. When your comedy is grounded by darkness and stakes, it just makes the comedy funnier.”
The vast archive of Wile E. Coyote cartoons, dating back to the 1949 short “Fast and Furry-ous” directed by the legendary animator Chuck Jones, was also fundamental to their understanding of the comedic timing of the “Looney Tunes” world — and to who this coyote is as a character. Though some might think of Wile E. as a villain just trying to kill and eat the Roadrunner, Green considers him an eternal optimist.
“Every time he fails, he just picks himself up and tries again,” Green says. “There’s something definitely deep and inspiring about that. And the more we started to study the character, the more we understood his depth.”
On set, Wile E. shared space with Forte via a life-size puppet operated by acclaimed puppeteer David Barclay (who also manipulated Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi”). Before shooting started, Green’s team had a full plan for what all of the animated characters would be doing and which objects they would interact with in every scene.
“It took a lot of trust for someone like Will to be in this movie because he had to believe that this magic trick would eventually work and that these characters would eventually show up on screen and be his scene partners,” Green says. He describes the process of making “Coyote” as “taking a Polaroid that takes two or three years to develop.”
While some iterations of a speaking Wile E. Coyote have existed, Green and Burch agreed early on that their version would communicate only using signs.
“We felt the speaking version of the character was weird and disturbing and the voice never completely even matched what I thought Wile E. would sound like,” Green says. “To us, the most memorable version of the character was the one that was like a silent film actor.”
“Wile E. is easy to feel for,” Burch adds. “There’s a lot of want and desire in him. I looked at some Charlie Chaplin films and other films where one character doesn’t speak and tried to keep him very present on the page.”
His relentless drive notwithstanding, the animated Wile E. in “Coyote vs. Acme” undergoes a transformative evolution through his friendship with Forte’s Kevin, as they band against a seemingly insurmountable adversary, represented by Acme’s CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza) and his menacing lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena).
By the end of the trial, you may not expect how moving the picture is. “You’re feeling this emotion for this character who hasn’t talked the entire movie and who’s trying to kill this bird — I was very surprised,” Forte says. “My wife was crying.”
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says director Dave Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Considering the tribulations “Coyote vs. Acme” has overcome to finally reach theaters, it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what’s on screen and what transpired between the filmmakers and Warner Bros. (The studio reportedly rejected several offers from other companies interested in buying the film.)
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
Forte adds, “You can’t help but talk about David versus Goliath when talking about the journey that the characters take, and then you can just say the exact same thing about the journey the movie’s taking.”
Two other Warner Bros. movies, “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” and “Batgirl,” were written off when almost completed, but as of now, no one has come to their rescue.
“We were a random sacrifice,” says Burch. “We didn’t see it coming at all. That was the real relatable thing to Wile E. We really felt like we were following the plan and then something came out of the sky.”
The Looney Tunes are just too beloved to be locked away. They’ve endured for decades because their sharp sarcasm and clever comedy, whether physical or otherwise, still lands. Burch recalls test-screening reactions from young viewers, some of whom had never seen the original cartoons.
“They would ask the kids, ‘Do you know Bugs Bunny or the Looney Tunes?’ And sometimes the kids would say no, and that wouldn’t affect how they liked this movie or how they felt for Coyote and Roadrunner,” says Burch. “Hopefully this will be an entry point to some kids and then they can go back and catch up on the last 100 years.”
Green believes everyone who worked on “Coyote” surpassed expectations, not only because they trusted the screenplay and his vision, but out of their love for the Looney Tunes.
“People were feeling like they owed it to these characters to deliver for them,” he says. “They really are legacy characters.”
But not everything is whimsy and laughs when working with timeless cartoon stars. One of them, Green says, tends to steal the spotlight.
“Bugs is very difficult because he always has to be right and he is a trickster,” Green says. “He has movie star energy and, in a movie where we’re really trying to make a story about Wile E. Coyote first and foremost, anytime Bugs is mentioned or is in a scene, he has this electrifying force.”
“He’s a major problem,” Green adds solemnly, before cracking the slightest smile.
Owners may come and go, but that wascally wabbit stays.
Early in November 2023, the night before Warner Bros. Discovery announced its decision to scrap “Coyote vs. Acme,” opting instead to take a $30-million tax write-off on the hybrid live-action-animation film, actor Will Forte received enthusiastic news about the project.
“I got a call from the producers saying they were ready to show us the movie, and they were so excited, and it was testing really well,” Forte, 56, recalls during a recent interview in Century City. “It was the very next day that we got the call that it was getting shelved.”
Six days after that devastating blow to their collective morale, the cast and crew attended a “funeral screening” on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank to watch the film they’d worked on for the first time, one that, presumably, the public would never get to see.
“In those six days, my brain was trying to make sense of it, and I felt like: It must not be very good then,” Forte explains with a doubtful expression. Reclining on an office chair on a hot July afternoon, the former “SNL” star appears pensive thinking back on that upheaval.
“ ‘Maybe these guys just lost their heads a little bit,’ ” Forte says, speaking from the perspective of the deciders. “ ‘They were too close to it. They had been working on it so long that they fell in love with this thing that just is not as good as they thought.’ ”
But, as he would learn at the screening, the execs at WB were wrong. “We went in and watched the movie and it was fantastic.”
Will Forte advises a new client in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
Forte continues, “All this confusion and frustration turned to a lot of anger. I worked through a lot of stuff over the course of a couple months. And then eventually it was just like: It’s not healthy for me to feel these feelings. I just gotta let it go.”
Thankfully, public outcry and a scrappy indie distributor saved “Coyote vs. Acme” from oblivion after Warner Bros. allowed its makers to shop the movie around.
Last year, Ketchup Entertainment bought the picture from Warner Bros. for an estimated $50 million (the movie reportedly cost $70 million to produce), and “Coyote vs. Acme” is finally coming to theaters nationwide this Friday.
“I had resigned myself at the time that this movie might take 30 years to get out of the vault,” screenwriter Samy Burch says on a video call. “I’m really happy that Ketchup saved it and now it’s going to be out there forever and no one can stop it.”
Forte plays Kevin Avery, a downcast injury lawyer living in Albuquerque who begrudgingly accepts a new client, the tenacious Wile E. Coyote, in a trial against the Acme Corp. The desert-dwelling, nonverbal cartoon character is suing the company for all the injuries its products have caused him in his pursuit of his would-be dinner, the Roadrunner.
Will Forte. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
The gag-filled comedy overflows with wackiness, as is customary for “Looney Tunes,” but also, and perhaps less expectedly, poignancy galore.
Even after Warner Bros. uttered a seemingly decisive “That’s all folks” in regard to the movie, director Dave Green believed the production’s quality would ultimately save it.
“There was always a flicker of hope, and I don’t think we ever gave up on that,” says a soft-spoken Green, 43, sitting next to Forte. “Something I told people on our crew was, ‘Forever is a really long time.’ I always felt like at some point the movie had to eventually be seen on the grand spectrum of time.”
Warner Bros., he says, didn’t provide much of an explanation for its machinations. “It was a very brief conversation,” he recalls. “They just said that their strategy had changed.”
During the time when the future of “Coyote vs. Acme” was uncertain, Green recalls feeling grateful for the mere fact that he and his collaborators were allowed to make such a singular film: a courtroom drama and animated comedy starring “Looney Tunes” characters.
“That in its own way is kind of an impossibility,” Green says. “Even though we never knew if audiences would see it or when they would see it, it felt like the win was getting to make this movie in the way we wanted to make it in the first place.”
Director Dave Green. (Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Taking its title and core premise from Ian Frazier’s 1990 humor piece published in the New Yorker magazine (written in persuasive legalese and formatted like the actual opening statement of a trial), “Coyote vs. Acme” had been floating around Hollywood for decades. At some point, “Guardians of the Galaxy” filmmaker James Gunn and screenwriter Jeremy Slater spearheaded it.
“I was brought to the project through the New Yorker short story and first had interest in making it back in the late ’90s when I first came to L.A,” Gunn tells The Times via email. “Unlike most ‘story by’ credits, I didn’t write a screenplay. I simply wrote the story for the film that would be a buddy comedy about Wile E. and a personal injury lawyer and tried to bring some heart as well as humor into it.”
Gunn, who shares a producer credit with Chris DeFaria, operated from sincere adoration for the characters, in particular the tireless protagonist. “I’ve always liked Wile E. — he has always been my favorite ‘Looney Tunes’ character,” he says. “So even though, like most people, I rooted for Roadrunner in their adventures, I still had a lot of empathy for him.”
In 2020, with Green attached to direct, the project underwent a reset, which included bringing in screenwriter Samy Burch, a future Oscar nominee for her already penned “May December” script. Their approach hinged on leaning into Frazier’s deadpan tone and taking the concept more seriously.
Searing courtroom dramas like “The Verdict,” “Dark Waters,” “The Insider,” “A Few Good Men” and “Erin Brockovich” all went into “the sauce” of the project, Green says. “These are all movies that are about the little guy facing some element of unfairness and wanting justice. That’s really at the core of this movie and Wile E.’s fight.”
Those other movies don’t have “Looney Tunes,” though.
“Samy and I were always laughing, like, ‘If you just put Foghorn Leghorn into this one scene from ‘The Verdict,’ it would be hilarious,’” Green says.
John Cena has a laugh with Foghorn Leghorn in the movie “Coyote vs. Acme.”
(Ketchup Entertainment)
On top of those hard-hitting trial movies, Robert Zemeckis’ 1988 “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” the classic live-action-animation hybrid film, served as a substantial source of inspiration. A direct parody of 1974’s “Chinatown,” it’s a technical marvel, especially for its time, one that fully commits to the zaniness of its hand-drawn protagonist.
“It’s a film noir that is also starring cartoon characters, and it’s got this collision of tones,” Green says of Zemeckis’ landmark, a movie that somehow bridges bonk-on-the-head mania with a voluptuous femme fatale. “On the one hand it’s very dark. On the other hand, it’s very silly and stupid even. That mash-up is really entertaining to me. When your comedy is grounded by darkness and stakes, it just makes the comedy funnier.”
The vast archive of Wile E. Coyote cartoons, dating back to the 1949 short “Fast and Furry-ous” directed by the legendary animator Chuck Jones, was also fundamental to their understanding of the comedic timing of the “Looney Tunes” world — and to who this coyote is as a character. Though some might think of Wile E. as a villain just trying to kill and eat the Roadrunner, Green considers him an eternal optimist.
“Every time he fails, he just picks himself up and tries again,” Green says. “There’s something definitely deep and inspiring about that. And the more we started to study the character, the more we understood his depth.”
On set, Wile E. shared space with Forte via a life-size puppet operated by acclaimed puppeteer David Barclay (who also manipulated Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi”). Before shooting started, Green’s team had a full plan for what all of the animated characters would be doing and which objects they would interact with in every scene.
“It took a lot of trust for someone like Will to be in this movie because he had to believe that this magic trick would eventually work and that these characters would eventually show up on screen and be his scene partners,” Green says. He describes the process of making “Coyote” as “taking a Polaroid that takes two or three years to develop.”
While some iterations of a speaking Wile E. Coyote have existed, Green and Burch agreed early on that their version would communicate only using signs.
“We felt the speaking version of the character was weird and disturbing and the voice never completely even matched what I thought Wile E. would sound like,” Green says. “To us, the most memorable version of the character was the one that was like a silent film actor.”
“Wile E. is easy to feel for,” Burch adds. “There’s a lot of want and desire in him. I looked at some Charlie Chaplin films and other films where one character doesn’t speak and tried to keep him very present on the page.”
His relentless drive notwithstanding, the animated Wile E. in “Coyote vs. Acme” undergoes a transformative evolution through his friendship with Forte’s Kevin, as they band against a seemingly insurmountable adversary, represented by Acme’s CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voiced by Eric Bauza) and his menacing lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena).
By the end of the trial, you may not expect how moving the picture is. “You’re feeling this emotion for this character who hasn’t talked the entire movie and who’s trying to kill this bird — I was very surprised,” Forte says. “My wife was crying.”
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says director Dave Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
(Ian Spanier / For The Times)
Considering the tribulations “Coyote vs. Acme” has overcome to finally reach theaters, it’s impossible not to see the parallels between what’s on screen and what transpired between the filmmakers and Warner Bros. (The studio reportedly rejected several offers from other companies interested in buying the film.)
“It’s an underdog story about fighting the system and going up against a giant corporation,” says Green. “We could not have written it that way. We couldn’t have anticipated any of this.”
Forte adds, “You can’t help but talk about David versus Goliath when talking about the journey that the characters take, and then you can just say the exact same thing about the journey the movie’s taking.”
Two other Warner Bros. movies, “Scoob! Holiday Haunt” and “Batgirl,” were written off when almost completed, but as of now, no one has come to their rescue.
“We were a random sacrifice,” says Burch. “We didn’t see it coming at all. That was the real relatable thing to Wile E. We really felt like we were following the plan and then something came out of the sky.”
The Looney Tunes are just too beloved to be locked away. They’ve endured for decades because their sharp sarcasm and clever comedy, whether physical or otherwise, still lands. Burch recalls test-screening reactions from young viewers, some of whom had never seen the original cartoons.
“They would ask the kids, ‘Do you know Bugs Bunny or the Looney Tunes?’ And sometimes the kids would say no, and that wouldn’t affect how they liked this movie or how they felt for Coyote and Roadrunner,” says Burch. “Hopefully this will be an entry point to some kids and then they can go back and catch up on the last 100 years.”
Green believes everyone who worked on “Coyote” surpassed expectations, not only because they trusted the screenplay and his vision, but out of their love for the Looney Tunes.
“People were feeling like they owed it to these characters to deliver for them,” he says. “They really are legacy characters.”
But not everything is whimsy and laughs when working with timeless cartoon stars. One of them, Green says, tends to steal the spotlight.
“Bugs is very difficult because he always has to be right and he is a trickster,” Green says. “He has movie star energy and, in a movie where we’re really trying to make a story about Wile E. Coyote first and foremost, anytime Bugs is mentioned or is in a scene, he has this electrifying force.”
“He’s a major problem,” Green adds solemnly, before cracking the slightest smile.
Owners may come and go, but that wascally wabbit stays.
