Modern Hollywood Keeps Failing Looney Tunes. Will ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Finally Get It Right?

This week’s release of “Coyote vs. Acme” brings some of the most fanfare we’ve ever seen for a Looney Tunes movie in the 21st century, largely due to reasons that have little to do with the substance of the film itself. The film’s perilous road to the big screen — the attempt from Warner Bros. to scrap it for a tax write-off, the fan and creator outcry that followed, and the sale to Ketchup Entertainment — have been endlessly documented, and a large number of ticket buyers this weekend might be more motivated by artist solidarity than their interest in the legal woes of Wile E. Coyote.

But even if “Coyote vs. Acme” had been a drama-free release, the status of the Looney Tunes franchise would still be worth examining. The property has been a pillar of Warner Bros. since the 1940s, when the original “Merrie Melodies” shorts that played in front of movies served as both a box office draw and a showcase for the studio’s music publishing interests. Over the subsequent decades, characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Sylvester & Tweety, and Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote have become some of the most recognizable characters in American pop culture. They’ve spanned endless shorts, animated TV shows, toys, comic books, and theme park attractions. And anyone who was toured the Warner Bros. lot can tell you how highly the studio has traditionally valued the characters based on their prominent placement. The one area that’s lacking is theatrical feature films.

It’s fair to wonder why, even in the most IP-driven era of Hollywood history, the Looney Tunes characters have not been more effectively utilized on the big screen. While Warner Bros. found plenty of box office success releasing compilations of old shorts in theaters in the 1970s and ’80s, there have only been four original Looney Tunes feature films thus far: 1996’s “Space Jam,” 2006’s “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” 2021’s “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” and 2025’s “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (another onetime Warner Bros. project that Ketchup acquired).

The fact that the first fully animated Looney Tunes movie was released in 2025 is a delightful trivia fact to use on your cinephile friends, but it also seems unfathomable. Prior to “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” every single film in the franchise was a live-action hybrid. The trend started with “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” which reintroduced the characters to moviegoing audiences via a legendary act of corporate collaboration that saw Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse sharing the screen. But in hindsight, every subsequent movie looks like the work of an industry that doesn’t quite know how to use some of its most recognizable characters.

‘Space Jam’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

More than anything else, “Space Jam” was a brilliant piece of sneaker marketing. Nike had been using Bugs Bunny in a series of commercials starring Michael Jordan as a means of softening the basketball legend’s intense on-court image and marketing his Air Jordans to families. Allowing commercial director Joe Pytka to continue that work in a feature film that saw Jordan playing basketball alongside the Looney Tunes characters was a clever extension of the campaign. The pairing of the world’s best athlete and some iconic cartoon characters helped the film carve out a small place for itself within 1990s American monoculture, even if the thin storytelling failed to capture the full charm of Looney Tunes. But the film’s box office success (grossing over $250 million on an $80 million budget), set the franchise on a course dominated by live-action hybrids for the next quarter century.

‘Looney Tunes: Back in Action’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

While a multitude of “Space Jam” sequels starring athletes ranging from Tony Hawk to Tiger Woods were discussed, the characters wouldn’t return to cinemas until “Looney Tunes: Back in Action” hit theaters in 2003. Directed by Joe Dante, “Back in Action” took a “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”-esque approach to the characters, treating Bugs and Daffy as real-life movie stars who work on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles before being swept up in an international spy caper. The film, which paired the animated characters with live-action stars like Brendan Fraser and Steve Martin, was designed to relaunch an updated Looney Tunes franchise for the 21st century. But after it flopped with critics and at the box office, the franchise was left in purgatory.

Things stayed dormant until the 2020 launch of HBO Max, which incentivized Warner Bros. to place all of its best IP on display. A new series of cartoon shorts (appropriately titled “Looney Tunes Cartoons”) was created for the streaming service, which led to the spin-off feature film “The Day the Earth Blew Up.” It also led to the return of the “Space Jam” franchise.

While “Space Jam: A New Legacy” received a full theatrical release in 2021, it’s hard to interpret the film as anything more than an HBO Max commercial. LeBron James stepped into Michael Jordan’s shoes for a nonsensical story in which he gets trapped in the Warner Bros. IP library by an evil algorithm voiced by Don Cheadle. He runs into characters from all the studio’s major franchises, including “Harry Potter,” “Game of Thrones,” and all of its other cartoons before teaming up with Bugs Bunny and co. for another basketball game. A critical and commercial flop (though at least some of the latter can be blamed on post-pandemic box office weirdness), the film nevertheless achieves its goal of reminding us how many wonderful characters Warner Bros. owns, if only some service would be kind enough to let us access them all in one place.

‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Even if the rationale behind all of those films are understandable in a vacuum, that recap hardly reads like the story of a blue chip IP. It’s hard to fathom why we haven’t seen more attempts to reboot the franchise with fully animated films that let the characters focus on the cartoon antics that they do better than anyone else. “The Day the Earth Blew Up” is the closest thing we’ve seen to a pure Looney Tunes movie, but even that was a direct-to-streaming project that only wound up in theaters because corporate restructuring led it to Ketchup Entertainment. We’ve still never seen what could happen when a new animated Looney Tunes film gets the full force of a Warner Bros. marketing campaign.

Perhaps “Coyote vs. Acme” will change everything. Dave Green’s film (written by Samy Burch, from a story she developed with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater) adapts a legendary New Yorker story by humorist Ian Frazier that sees Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme corporation for the endlessly faulty contraptions that he uses in his fruitless attempts to catch Road Runner. It’s a clever premise, and early reviews suggest that it’s a worthy addition to the Looney Tunes canon. But it seems to be more of a one-off than the start of a new franchise.

While strong reviews and a passionate audience that wants to rail against corporate greed might carry “Coyote vs. Acme” at the box office, the film faces some of the same structural problems that have plagued past Looney Tunes movies. The biggest issue seems to be the fact that, like “Space Jam” and “Back in Action” before it, the premise assumes prior knowledge of Looney Tunes lore. The idea of watching Coyote sue Acme is funny enough for anyone who grew up watching those shorts, but it’s a complicated sell to new generations of fans. That’s perfectly fine for the audience the film appears to be targeting, but it still leaves a clear opportunity to reintroduce the characters.

Recent films like “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem,” and “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” have illustrated that Hollywood is filled with talented animators who are capable of completely reinventing recognizable franchises if given the chance. An updated take on “Looney Tunes” that aims to recapture the magic of the original animations without assuming too much prior knowledge or relying too heavily on nostalgia would likely be a dream project for many of them. If “Coyote vs. Acme” does well at the box office (or even if it doesn’t!), I hope that some of them get a chance to try.