Warner Bros is to scrap Coyote Vs Acme after all, a report says, with the studio having turned down offers from Netflix and Amazon.
For a while there, things looked positive for Coyote Vs Acme, the Looney Tunes comedy that Warner Bros was on the cusp of scrapping in November 2023. After a vocal backlash, it looked as though the studio had changed its mind, and was thinking about selling the film to another studio instead. According to a report published by The Wrap, however, the film may never be released after all.
Despite receiving offers from other firms – including Paramount, Netflix and Amazon – Warner Bros is reportedly still intent on deleting the film and claiming it as a tax write-off, seemingly because it couldn’t get the $75- to $80m asking price it was after. The Wrap (via Comicbook.com) even claims that studio boss David Zaslav still hasn’t bothered to sit down and watch the film.
Completed and set for release in July 2023 before being withdrawn, Coyote Vs Acme was a mixture of live-action and animation, with Will Forte and John Cena starring as lawyers representing two sides of a personal injury case between the hapless Wile E Coyote and Acme, the company that authored so much of the former’s pain.
Based on an article published by the New Yorker, it sounded like an ingenious cross between Who Framed Roger Rabbit and a John Grisham novel, and indeed, the few people who’ve seen the film have said it’s excellent.
Read more: Coyote Vs Acme | Behind the latest Warner Bros film we’ll never see
Warner Bros has form when it comes to scrapping movies – Batgirl and Scoob! 2 are among its other murder victims. Zaslav later described the scrapping of those two films – which were both largely completed – as “necessary”. To date, he doesn’t appear to have addressed the thinking behind this latest scrapped film, or why he didn’t at least assess its quality personally before passing judgement.
Nor is Warner Bros the only company to scrap movies that creative people have spent years of their life working on. Netflix recently axed The Mothership, a promising-sounding sci-fi thriller starring Halle Berry and directed by the screenwriter behind Bridge Of Spies. Incredibly, the cancellation was so abrupt that one crewmember we contacted didn’t even know it had happened until we asked them about it.
Let’s face it, if multi-million dollar films starring the likes of John Cena and Halle Berry aren’t safe from corporate knives, then just about any other project could be fair game.
Here’s hoping that a second outcry will help save Coyote Vs Acme from oblivion.
