Rating: ★★★☆☆
I went to see Coyote vs. Acme today. It was OK.
I’m not going to give it a particularly high rating, but I’m not going to give it a low one either. We’re going straight down the middle with three stars.
Before discussing the movie itself, we probably need to discuss how we are able to watch it at all.
Warner Bros. Discovery completed Coyote vs. Acme and then shelved it, reportedly planning to write down approximately $30 million of its roughly $70–72 million production cost. That did not mean the government handed Warner $30 million or purchased the movie. It meant Warner could report $30 million as a business loss, reducing the amount of its income subject to tax.
Nor was the write-down necessarily a permanent death sentence. If Warner later recovered money from the movie, it would have to report that transaction and adjust its taxes accordingly. That is essentially what happened when Ketchup Entertainment purchased the completed film for a reported $50 million. Warner recovered about $50 million of the $70–72 million it had spent, ultimately leaving it with a loss of roughly $20–22 million. Any earlier tax treatment could then be balanced against the newly recovered value.
Ketchup did not have to reconstruct an abandoned production. Coyote vs. Acme was already complete. It needed a distributor willing to buy, market and release it.
That gives me at least a little hope that Batgirl might someday escape the same vault. Warner canceled that approximately $90 million movie in 2022 under broadly similar circumstances, but there is an important difference: Batgirl was not finished. Principal photography had wrapped, but it still required effects work, editing and possibly additional filming. Any company attempting the same rescue would therefore need more than distribution rights. It would need access to the production materials, permission to complete a movie using Warner’s DC characters and agreements with whichever original filmmakers, actors and effects artists were still available.
I doubt that rescue will happen. Coyote vs. Acme was already finished, received encouraging test-screening reactions and still required an extraordinary campaign to reach theaters. Batgirl would require considerably more work, and reports about its test screenings were much less encouraging.
Still, the release of this movie proves that a tax write-down does not make a film legally unreleasable forever. The money can be reported and the accounting adjusted if someone eventually makes an offer worth accepting.
I’m not going to argue over whether Coyote vs. Acme deserved to be released or should have remained on the shelf. It’s out there now, and arguing that it should have stayed buried would just seem mean-spirited.
The movie is based on Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker humor piece “Coyote v. Acme.” Written as an attorney’s opening statement in a product-liability lawsuit, it argues that Acme should compensate Wile E. Coyote for the innumerable injuries caused by its defective products and inadequate warnings. It is an excellent premise for a movie. (Readers without a New Yorker subscription can read the authorized reprint published by the Texas Bar Journal.)
Calling the movie “based on” Ian Frazier’s article is generous. It borrows the title and the central idea of Wile E. Coyote filing a product-liability lawsuit against Acme, but very little else could transfer because the original is not really a story. It is a mock opening statement whose humor comes from describing cartoon catastrophes in perfectly straight legal language. The movie had to invent nearly everything required to turn that joke into a feature—and that is where most of its problems began.
I will say that the resulting movie wasn’t particularly well written. There were plot holes you could drive a cartoon through. The judge, played by Luis Guzmán, was practically a cartoon himself, dismissing arguments whenever the story needed him to. The movie attempts to explain this early on by telling us that Acme had essentially written the laws, so of course those laws favored Acme.
The writers then prevented themselves from using the best part of their source material. Kevin Avery is introduced as a nearly incompetent lawyer who avoids court and settles everything as quickly as possible. That gives him room for an underdog character arc, but it also means he could never convincingly deliver the sharp, meticulously reasoned argument from Frazier’s original piece. A capable product-liability attorney presenting that opening statement might have provided the movie with a genuinely great courtroom scene. Instead, the screenplay makes its lawyer too ineffectual to translate its best piece of legal writing to the screen.
I recently read about how difficult it was for the British government to dismantle the East India Company during the nineteenth century. That company had accumulated so much power that it governed territory, collected taxes and prosecuted its own wars. By the early nineteenth century, its private army contained approximately 250,000 soldiers—larger than Britain’s own army at times—and it repeatedly defeated forces much larger than itself. Britain required legislation after legislation to strip away its powers before finally dissolving it.
The parallel with Acme is surprisingly strong. Acme is not merely a manufacturer defending itself against a product-liability lawsuit. It has accumulated enough political, economic and military power to function like a sovereign state. It writes the laws, influences the courts and ultimately makes war against Wile E. Coyote. That is what the story is really about.
If Acme genuinely possesses East India Company levels of power over both the human and cartoon worlds, defeating it should require more than one favorable court verdict. It should require dismantling an entire corporate government. The movie gestures toward that much more interesting idea, but never really develops it.
Will Forte plays Wile E. Coyote’s lawyer, Kevin Avery. The surname is an obvious nod to legendary animation director Tex Avery, but the reference goes further than that. His law firm is Avery, Jones & Maltese: Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, three giants of Warner Bros. animation. Jones and Maltese were the director-and-writer team most closely associated with creating Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner in the first place.
Kevin’s legal aide is his niece, Paige Avery, played by Lana Condor. She provides both the legal and moral center of the film, and Condor does a very good job with the role. The other two people working in the nearly bankrupt law office are Sal Maltese, played by Tone Bell, and Dottie Jones, played by Martha Kelly. They are two-dimensional at best—which is particularly unfortunate because they are both live-action.
That historical knowledge is one of the movie’s genuine pleasures. Even when its story doesn’t quite hold together, it was clearly made by people who know the cartoons and understand the history behind them.
I’m not going to say that the voice work is spot-on, but it comes pretty close. The mixture of live action and animation is less successful. It isn’t as smooth or convincing as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, although that remains an extraordinarily high standard nearly forty years later.
Will Forte does have exactly the right voice to sound like a cartoon character himself. I found that interesting once I noticed it. He can share a scene with an animated coyote without seeming as though he belongs to an entirely different movie.
Here Come the Spoilers
Kevin Avery ultimately loses the lawsuit, largely because the judge dismisses the case after another round of animated courtroom shenanigans. Then, through narrative magic, Avery and Wile E. are summoned to testify before Congress.
That may provide a bigger stage for the climax, but it does nothing to solve the problem established by the lawsuit. Congress is not another court. Even if a congressional committee ruled entirely in Wile E.’s favor, it could not award him damages. It could investigate Acme, expose its conduct, rewrite the laws or refer possible crimes for prosecution, but it could not simply order Acme to give Wile E. a million dollars.
That distinction matters because Avery, Jones & Maltese is out of money and preparing to close while Avery is in Washington. Winning the moral argument before Congress would not save the law firm or compensate its client.
Naturally, the hearing does not initially go their way either. Acme has written the laws governing its own conduct, including a particularly grotesque rule allowing cartoons to be tortured because they always recover and therefore supposedly suffer no permanent injury. Acme has not merely found loopholes in the law. It has constructed an entire legal system in which making war against cartoons is perfectly lawful.
But the movie does have a happy ending, and plenty of guest stars show up along the way. Most of your Warner Bros. cartoon favorites make at least an appearance.
One thing the movie happily keeps consistent is that Wile E. never speaks. He communicates entirely through his familiar signs.
The funny conceit is that he has only a limited collection of signs, yet he still manages to say quite a lot with them. Sometimes another character has to interpret what he means, but the movie never gives in and allows him to speak merely because dialogue would be easier.
His reunion with the Road Runner at the very end is somehow both unexpected and inevitable.
Stay through the credits, at least until the main credit scroll begins. Some amusing cardboard-style animated sequences play during the earlier portion.
Ultimately, Coyote vs. Acme is not a bad movie. It is an adequate movie built around a very good premise. If the screenplay had been given another two or three serious passes through a strong writers’ room, it might have become something genuinely good. Instead, it was completed as it was, nearly disappeared forever and has now been released as it is.
Three stars feels exactly right.
Principal Cast
- Will Forte — Kevin Avery
- Lana Condor — Paige Avery
- John Cena — Buddy Crane
- Tone Bell — Sal Maltese
- Martha Kelly — Dottie Jones
- P. J. Byrne — Bill Pellicano
- Luis Guzmán — the judge
- Eric Bauza — Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd
- Jeff Bergman — Bugs Bunny, Sylvester and Yosemite Sam
- Bob Bergen — Tweety
- Fred Tatasciore — the Tasmanian Devil