‘Coyote vs. Acme’ Director Dave Green ‘Remains in Shock’ That the Film Is Coming Out

The long, winding road of “Coyote vs. Acme,” the latest in a long line of live-action films based on the “Looney Tunes” characters, is about as complex and tangled as the conspiracy Wile E. Coyote and his allies spend the film‘s runtime unpacking. Shot from March to May 2022 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “Coyote vs. Acme” was shelved by Warner Bros. the following year for the purposes of obtaining a tax write-off, one of many projects — most infamously a “Batgirl” movie — to be canned by David Zaslav’s company before it ever received a real release. Warner Bros. eventually reversed the decision, but still wouldn’t distribute the movie. So, for two years, before Ketchup Entertainment finally acquired it in March 2025, the team behind the film, a charming courtroom comedy mixing live-action with animation, had no idea if their work would ever actually be seen.

“I heard about the news that Ketchup had acquired the movie maybe 24 hours before everyone else found out, and I absolutely could not believe it,” director Dave Green said during a recent interview with IndieWire. “At that point in time, I was kind of finding a place of acceptance that, hey, we made a movie that we’re really proud of and we love, and it’s something that we can own in our hearts, but maybe it’s something people will never see. The day I heard that news, I was in total shock. I remain in total shock.”

“It is a miracle that we are sitting together, getting to talk about the movie today,” he continued. “It was a wild ride, and I would say making any movie is a gargantuan task. You’re pushing a boulder up a hill, and as a director, you are trained to deal with things that you don’t expect all the time. What I saw through this process — the incredible support of everyone online, and friends, and other filmmakers, and people who had seen the film, and people who just wanted to see the film speaking out and wanting to support the movie, it was such an incredible miracle.”

Green, whose other directorial work includes the sci-fi adventure film “Earth to Echo” and 2016’s “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows,” has been attached to “Coyote vs. Acme” since 2019, when he was hired to direct the film when it was in development at Warner Bros. The movie, based on a satirical 1990 New Yorker piece about a lawsuit from the cartoon character Wile E. Coyote suing the Acme Corporation for the many faulty products he employs.

A child of the ’90s, Green grew up watching the Coyote and Roadrunner series of cartoons as well as modern-at-the-time spiritual successors like “Tiny Toon Adventures,” “Animaniacs,” and “Pinky and the Brain.” He loved the classic shorts of animators Chuck Jones and Tex Avery because of their sophistication and lack of sentimentality compared to other animated movies.

“All of them were just so funny to me because they were violent and they were irreverent. They weren’t saccharine: they were sarcastic and subversive and weird,” Green said. “That was always the fabric of what ‘Looney Tunes’ was to me as a kid and in the DNA from the very beginning. And so, in making this movie, we tried to carry that torch the best we could, and and speak as much as we could with that tonality and that voice, and keep it weird and keep it smart and sophisticated and dark and funny.”

‘Coyote vs. Acme’Courtesy Everett Collection

The resulting film carries much of the slapstick spirit that has made “Looney Tunes” such an enduring franchise. But like other “Looney Tune” big-screen features such as “Space Jam” and “Back in Action,” it also stretches the set pieces into a proper, full-length story. The result is a daffy (pun intended) parody of conspiracy theory and legal thrillers that sees Wile and his legal team, put upon personal injury attorney Kevin Avery (Will Forte) and his ambitious niece Paige (Lana Condor), attempt to uncover the corruption stewing inside the mega-conglomerate Acme involving the abuse and mistreatment of cartoons.

Similar to the other “Looney Tunes” films, “Coyote vs. Acme” derives much of its humor from combining live-action performances with animated characters in a “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?” fashion. To plan ahead for the mix between the two mediums, Green had a team of storyboard artists map out every scene in a similar manner as to how a Pixar or Disney movie gets made, mapping out all the beats and jokes and where the animated characters would go ahead of the actual live-action shooting. During production, the filmmakers employed David Barclay, a puppeteer who worked on several Jim Henson projects such as “The Dark Crystal” or “Return of the Jedi” and served as the chief puppeteer on “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” Barclay built a life-size Coyote puppet for the actors to perform with, and Green had the cast shoot most scenes twice: one heavily choreographed to their original plans, and one more spontaneous take with the puppet so that the interactions between animated and human characters could work naturally in the final product.

“The crazy thing is, and I didn’t realize this when I signed on, Wile E. Coyote does not exist,” Green joked.

‘Coyote vs. AcmeCourtesy Everett Collection

Unlike “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,” the final product uses a blend of 2D animation with some 3D animation, handled by the British company DNEG. Green chose to use 3D for certain shots so he could better control elements like lighting, compositing, shadow, and an added grain effect on top of Wile that couldn’t necessarily be controlled with completely traditional 2D animation. With all the moving parts, directing the film sometimes became extraordinarily complicated. The second day of filming saw the team film a gag sequence where Wile attempts to bring an endless supply of gadgets and weapons through a courtroom metal detector, with about 40 to 50 background actors whom Green had to direct to find the eyeline of a completely invisible character. It was the most challenging sequence he had to film, although he also called it his favorite.

Although “Coyote vs. Acme” is a largely lighthearted film filled with physical comedy of that nature, the script by Samy Burch isn’t completely frivolous. Its storyline spins the futile, determined chase of Wile to one day capture Roadrunner as something admirable, and applies that underdog mentality to the average person trying to navigate a late capitalist landscape that values profits over people. It’s a moral that’s resonant with the journey the film itself had to finally find a proper theatrical release. And Green noted that, in the wake of more recent news involving corporate mergers, the film just feels more timely now than it did when it was shot four years ago.

“I think the themes that we were talking about when we were making the movie have only become more relevant since we’ve made the movie,” Green said. “I watched the movie after all of the news broke, and I could not believe the kind of surreal meta whirlpool that the movie had kind of become. It felt like a hall of mirrors, where it almost felt like we had shot the movie after the news had broke. It was surreal, but it’s that we all deal with every single day in our daily lives, which is trying to have voices and autonomy in a very corporate world.”

Ketchup Entertainment will release “Coyote vs. Acme” in theaters August 28.