That’s not all folks … Will Forte as Kevin Avery in Coyote vs Acme. Photograph: Altitude View image in fullscreen That’s not all folks … Will Forte as Kevin Avery in Coyote vs Acme. Photograph: Altitude Film Something Wile E this way comes: how the Looney Toons reboot movie came back from the dead Cartoon royalty were lined for a live-action toon hybrid Coyote vs Acme. Then it was shelved as a tax write-off. But its cast, crew and fans fought for its release. Three years later it’s set to be a surprise summer hit
Prefer the Guardian on Google B ack 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.
View image in fullscreen 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!’”
View image in fullscreen Director Dave Green … ‘We got this incredible outpouring of support. That really buoyed us.’ Photograph: Chris Pizzello/AP 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.”
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 don…