Coyote vs. Acme (2026)
The first ACME crate hits the courtroom floor with a thud that sounds exactly like every anvil that ever landed on that coyote’s head, and something in me sat up. It is a small production choice, reusing the actual sound effects from eighty years of cartoon violence as literal courtroom evidence, but it tells you what kind of film you are about to watch. Dave Green’s Coyote vs. Acme does not treat its premise as a novelty. It commits.
Wile E. Coyote (voiced, with genuine pathos, by Eric Bauza) has finally had enough. After decades of exploding gadgets and collapsing bridges, he hires Kevin Avery (Will Forte), a lawyer whose career and marriage have both stalled out, to sue the ACME Corporation for product liability. Kevin’s old boss and former mentor Buddy Crane (John Cena, playing smarm with real commitment) now represents ACME, and the case becomes as much a reckoning between the two men as it is a class action. That’s the whole engine of the film: a live-action legal drama wearing a Looney Tunes costume. It mostly wears it well.
Green directs the hybrid sequences with a confidence a lesser film would have fumbled. Animated chaos erupts inside courtrooms and law offices without the seams showing, and the film understands something a lot of nostalgia projects don’t: the joy of these old cartoons was never really about Wile E. losing. It was about commitment to the bit. His hopeless faith that this next contraption would finally work. Forte plays Kevin with that same doomed optimism, and the pairing works: his exhausted, over-explaining line readings against Cena’s practised courtroom charm give the film an actual push and pull, not just cartoon energy bolted onto a legal drama.
Where the film runs into trouble is its own ambition. Coyote vs. Acme wants to be a genuine satire of corporate negligence: the way liability law lets a company treat human, and coyote, cost as a line item. That’s a real target. There are stretches where the writing, credited to Samy Burch from a story with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, finds real bite in it. But the film keeps pulling back from its own argument whenever the plot needs a laugh, and by the third act it has largely traded satire for slapstick spectacle. The theme is there. But it doesn’t survive contact with the film’s own need to be a crowd-pleaser. I wanted it to trust its premise a little more than it trusted its gags.
The supporting cast, including Lana Condor, does solid work without ever threatening to steal focus from the central pair, which is probably the right call given how much of the film rests on Forte and Cena landing their scenes together. They do.
It’s worth remembering the road this film travelled to reach a screen at all: completed in 2023, shelved by Warner Bros. for a tax write-off despite strong test scores, then rescued by Ketchup Entertainment after a genuine grassroots campaign. Knowing that history coloured how generously I watched it. But generosity only goes so far. Coyote vs. Acme earns most of its goodwill on its own terms: a smart hook, a pair of committed lead performances, and a first two acts with real satirical teeth, even if the ending softens its own point more than I’d have liked.
Worth your time, particularly if you grew up on the original cartoons. Just don’t expect it to follow through on its own best idea all the way to the finish line.