Warner buried Coyote vs. Acme for a tax break — it just crossed $82 million in theaters
In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery looked at a finished, test-audience-approved Looney Tunes movie and decided it was worth more dead than alive — roughly $30 million more, in tax write-off form.
Cut to September 2026: that same "worthless" movie has spent three straight weekends in the global top five and just blew past its entire production budget in ticket sales. I simply must laugh.
A brief history of corporate self-sabotage
The timeline reads like something Wile E. himself rigged with a giant rubber band:
- 2023: WBD shelves the completed $70 million film — a courtroom comedy where the Coyote sues Acme Corp, based on Ian Frazier's legendary New Yorker piece — the literal day after inviting the cast to a celebratory screening.
- The internet loses it. Filmmakers, fans, people with Wile E. Coyote tattoos (three crew members have them, allegedly) refuse to let it die.
- March 2025: Ketchup Entertainment pays around $50 million for worldwide rights and does what a trillion-dollar studio wouldn't: puts the movie in theaters.
- August 28, 2026: it opens. By weekend three, it's at $82.8 million worldwide and still in the top five, shrugging off the Practical Magic 2 premiere like an anvil bouncing off a boulder.
A 9/10 review couldn't save Andrew Garfield's new movie from the emptiest theaters
Even the star didn't believe
Will Forte, who plays the Coyote's ambulance-chasing lawyer, spent those limbo years assuming the online campaign was screaming into a void. He admitted to The Hollywood Reporter at the premiere:
"They're not hearing you, it's not going to make a difference."
Reader, they heard. Director Dave Green, in his opening-day victory lap transcribed by Gizmodo, declared:
"Persistence and resilience have truly won the day."
He also snuck a dedication into the end credits thanking everyone who posted and held up signs while the film sat in a vault. The movie about a little guy suing a faceless corporation was rescued from a faceless corporation by little guys. The screenplay writes itself, except it already existed and someone tried to delete it.
The moral of the story (there isn't one, just vibes)
Somewhere in Burbank, an executive spreadsheet insisted this movie was a liability. The movie responded by out-earning its budget in under a month for a distributor a fraction of Warner's size. Meep meep, as they say in legal circles.
Previously we wrote: Netflix's next Arcane is the dark fantasy a lawsuit kept buried for 8 years
