Something Wile E this way comes: how the Looney Toons reboot movie came back from the dead

Back in 2020, Dave Green started making his new film, Coyote vs Acme. Mixing live action with animation, it would be an unconventional courtroom drama that pitched actor Will Forte against a host of 2D Looney Tunes characters – including cartoon royalty such as Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig and Bugs Bunny. This, Green believed, would weave a heady spell for cinemagoers of all ages. Six years later, his film is finally about to be released. When Green first called “Action!”, his dark hair was not yet flecked liberally with grey. It is now.

“We’ve held on to a lot of hope these past few years,” Green says from his home in Los Angeles, “and we never really let go of it.”

That sustained hope was necessary because, just three months after filming wrapped in 2023, Warner Brothers announced that it was shelving the movie, alongside two others, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, as part of a major tax write-off. It would never see the light of day.

The need for speed … Wile E Coyote in Coyote vs Acme. Photograph: Altitude

For Forte, the project’s palpably human lead, this came as an abrupt shock. “We’d gotten a call from our producers on a Tuesday night saying they were excited about it, that it had tested really well with audiences,” Forte says. “But then, the very next day, came the Warner Brothers news.” He palms his forehead hard enough to leave a mark. “We still went ahead with our own screening of it, but it became a funeral screening.”

While it seems reasonable enough to assume that Scoob! Holiday Haunt would prove no great loss to cinematic history, the fate of Coyote Vs Acme was far less explicable. Looney Tunes holds a special place in the hearts of millions of people who grew up in front of televisions at any point between the 1950s and 1980s, and Green had done a commendable job in breathing new, and slyly modern, life into them.

Cast and crew were stunned by the cancellation. Then came the anger. “Oh, I just got to this very angry place,” Forte says, “and I needed to release it somehow. I wrote a bunch of very angry posts, really scorched-earth stuff, and I’d send them to my agents asking if it was OK to post. They were like: ‘Don’t you dare!’”

Nevertheless, when Forte was interviewed about it by Entertainment Weekly magazine in the US, he said that it had left him feeling “extreme frustration, fiery frustration, a lot of anger, white-hot anger”.

It was his wife who suggested he calm down. “She made me see that it was doing me no good to have these feelings in my system all the time. I tried to let it go. It was a grieving process, really.”

Director Dave Green … ‘We got this incredible outpouring of support. That really buoyed us.’ Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP

Forte eventually moved on, as actors will, most recently with the hit Netflix series The Four Seasons. Green, meanwhile, stewed over his apparent failure, wondering what he’d done wrong. “But then,” he says, “we got this incredible outpouring of support from so many people. That really buoyed us.”

Green, whose previous credits include 2016’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, first got the idea for Coyote vs Acme after reading a humorous article in the New Yorker magazine from 1990 by the writer Ian Frazier, in which Wile E Coyote sues Acme for their faulty products.

“I grew up watching family movies that were very close to what was going on here,” he adds. “Films like Beetlejuice, Ghostbusters, Tim Burton’s Batman, ET. All were, in certain ways, dark and adult, but also fun and bright, and silly and funny. I wanted to make something that didn’t talk down to viewers.”

Green’s film was funded by an initially enthusiastic Warner Brothers with a $70m budget. On finishing the film, Forte was wildly optimistic. “Dave did such a terrific job and I just wanted people to see it. After the Warner Brothers thing, I started to fantasise about helping it reach an audience. I’d dream I was going to win the lottery, then release the movie myself and give all the proceeds to charity.”

His frustrations, publicly aired as they were, were not in vain. Indeed, they encouraged others to follow suit. Fans of the cartoons, who had read about the film’s plight, took to the internet in their thousands to express discontent, as did members of the production crew. The film’s composer Steven Price (who won an Oscar in 2013 for Gravity) shared an online clip of his work with an orchestra and a choir at Abbey Road “because no one will see it now”. The post got 6.8m views.

John Cena as Buddy Crane in Coyote vs Acme. Photograph: Altitude

While it is not yet a matter of public record how Warner Brothers reacted to all this, they nevertheless became increasingly aware that they’d let go of a hot property. The prospect of selling it on to another production company was appealing from a financial perspective, but less so if it then went on to be a smash hit. Last year, the film finance and distribution company Ketchup Entertainment bought it for about $50m. A global release is imminent.

“I still can’t believe it’s happening,” says Green. “There are so many parallels. This is a movie about an underdog and it’s become an underdog itself. Truly, we are here because everyone spoke out on its behalf, which is just – well, it’s insane, really. I’m sorry,” he says. “I still haven’t found a way to articulate it any better than that. It feels like a miracle. We just got extremely lucky, I guess.” Eventually, yes. They did.