Between their hilarious debut in 1949’s “Fast and Furry-ous” and the end of their golden era run in 1966 with “Sugar and Spies,” Warner Bros. released 40 animated shorts featuring the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.
That the modern incarnation of the studio famously tried to bury their first feature-length collaboration, Coyote vs. Acme, for a tax write-off shows that the pencil pushers do not understand their longevity. It’s not that anyone cares about the Road Runner. It’s that we can all see ourselves in Wile E. Coyote: always getting smashed in the face with the anvil of life, our sole goal always eluding us, and at the whim of corporations who ship us crappy products that never work right.
Screenwriter Samy Burch gets it. Director Dave Green gets it. And Ketchup Entertainment, the distributor who also rescued The Day the Earth Blew Up from Warners’ accounting schemes, definitely gets it. Between them, they have created and rescued what may well be the funniest, most heartfelt, and downright entertaining film of the summer.
The other human who truly gets it is Will Forte, who plays Albuquerque cartoon lawyer Kevin Avery. Not that he’s a cartoon. He practices cartoon law, the small claims stuff like getting a piano in the face or smashing into a canyon wall on malfunctioning jet skates. That’s how he ends up with Wile E. in his office for what he thinks will be a quick out-of-court settlement for a few hundred dollars. But that’s not what Wile E. wants. The Acme Corporation has ruined his life through their shoddy goods, and now he wants his day in court.
Originating as a comic piece by Ian Frazier in The New Yorker in 1990, Coyote vs. Acme finally solves one of the great conundrums of cartoons – that being, how does a desert dweller with no visible means of support afford all these wonderful toys? That’s kind of the core of the film, which opens with the mysterious disappearance, 30 years earlier, of Acme researcher Dr. Lorre (voiced, as are many of the cartoon characters, by Eric Bauza).
Animation buffs will remember that a caricature version of the real Peter Lorre cropped up as a mad scientist in several Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts, and Coyote vs. Acme is stacked with such deep cut characters. Yet they never feel like just a nod for nerds. There’s a love to every cameo, an understanding of what they would be doing in the real world, and that love finds its greatest expression in Forte’s performance. The undoing of any hybrid live action/animation movie is that fatal moment when the lead is shocked or amazed or bemused that there is a cartoon character in front of them. Avery never has that moment because this is his life, these are his clients, and he treats everyone with the same tired dismissiveness, whether they be pen-and-ink or flesh-and-blood. Forte’s performance has the same dogged energy as Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? He’s never once subject to cartoon physics but is absolutely at the mercy of cartoon logic, especially when he goes eye-to-eye (well, eye-to-mid-chest) with John Cena as his old college rival and Acme’s cutthroat attorney, Buddy Crane. A living cartoon himself, Cena also never blinks in the face of his animated co-actors, not even when Foghorn Leghorn arrives as Acme’s merciless CEO.
Coyote vs. Acme isn’t just funny. It’s Looney Tunes funny. The kind of gut-busting, roll-in-the-aisles hilarious that has you laughing halfway through the joke because the delivery is so perfect, and you’ll laugh even harder because the payoff, predictable as it has to be, is a legitimate hoot. Between all the genius prop comedy and pratfalls, there’s also a lot of heart, as Forte plays so perfectly against Wile E.’s dumb-show side of the conversation – two losers with everything in common.
It’s also funny because it gets what made the original shorts funny, the timing and the creativity and the bathos, and then modernizes it without getting cute. Green clearly realized there’s no need for Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers-style fourth-wall-busting winks to the audience because the fight against the evil corporation is what brings the story right up to date. It shows what Warners seemingly didn’t get, that the appeal of the underdog is eternal, and that right now the hero we need is the guy who will stand up against late-stage capitalism and pull a wooden-handled placard that says, “No more!” from seemingly thin air. No longer should we say, “I am Spartacus.” We are all Wile E. Coyote.
Coyote vs. Acme
2026, PG, 103 min. Directed by Dave Green. Starring Will Forte, John Cena, Luis Guzmán, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, P. J. Byrne, Martha Kelly.
This article appears in August 28 • 2026.
