Back in 2024, after Warner Bros. decided to can Coyote vs. Acme for a tax write-off, there were “funeral screenings” held for the cast and crew, most of whom were seeing it for the first time. It was also, as far as anyone knew, the last time the film would be shown. There were offers from other distributors, but Warner Bros. turned them all down and refused to negotiate on price. Coyote vs. Acme was worth more to them dead than alive. “All of us… were looking around at each other and saying, ‘Is this the version that they saw that made them want to get rid of it?’” actor Will Forte told The Wrap. “It was baffling. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t.”

But like its star Wile E. Coyote in his mission to catch the Road Runner, something as small as total, unprecedented catastrophe couldn’t put a stop to Coyote vs. Acme. The film’s shelving attracted widespread condemnation from social media users, industry figures, and in the pages of this very magazine. And now, three years on, boutique distributor Ketchup Entertainment—11 years old to Warner’s 100 plus—has gotten the once-doomed movie onto the big screen. Going to see it felt like a civic duty in the best sense: as sacred as suffrage, but with a lot more rocket-powered roller skates.

After those roller skates become the latest purchase from the Acme Corporation to backfire, Wile E. Coyote sees an advertisement for a personal injury lawyer specializing in defective cartoon products. He makes out another one of his famous blueprint plans: Step One, go to the city; Step Two, get a lawyer.

But Kevin Avery (Will Forte) is a disillusioned and burnt-out small-timer, filing small claims against Acme that get settled for chump change. Acme, in this universe, is a monopolistic corporate power: they produce a line of “cartoon products,” like anvils, pianos, and other things that might fall on your animated head, but also everyday products for humans, like phones and cars. The latter seem suspiciously less prone to exploding, though to begin with, nobody is all that suspicious. Kevin tells his new client that this is just another 200-dollar roller skates case—only for Mr. Coyote to submit all his defective Acme products into evidence, making a case worth millions. It goes straight to Acme’s top legal mind: Buddy Crane (John Cena), Kevin’s old Harvard rival.

In the same way that Who Framed Roger Rabbit used the tropes of film noir, Coyote vs. Acme incorporates the conventions of the legal thriller. Here, Bugs Bunny is akin to Deep Throat in All the President’s Men, secretly passing information to Wile E. and his allies under the cover of darkness. Underdog courtroom dramas about persecuted whistleblowers and brave stances against corporate greed are key touchstones, with director Dave Green citing 1999’s The Insider (about Big Tobacco whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand) and 2000’s Erin Brockovich (about the legal case against PG&E for water contamination in Hinkley, California) as influences. As with the very real corporations in those films, Acme is content to let its customers suffer—makes a point of it, in fact, as part of the mysterious “Project Sisyphus,” on which cartoon Peter Lorre was working before his disappearance into a portable cartoon hole.

Cartoon Lorre is, in the classic cartoons, often a mad scientist villain. In Coyote vs. Acme, he takes on shades of his real life counterpart. While live-action Peter Lorre never suffered such a dramatic fate, the actor was “graylisted” by Warner Bros over his continuing friendship with Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, with whom he had worked in Berlin in the 1920s, and who spent World War II living in exile in California. Lorre’s firm support for labor in the 1940s Warner Bros. strikes surely compounded corporate’s impression of him as a dangerous person to keep in their employ. Warner Bros. terminated Lorre’s contract in 1946; by 1949, an actor famous enough to be turned into a recurring Looney Tunes character had filed for bankruptcy. Not a portable cartoon hole, but pretty close.

The reference to the ancient Greek character Sisyphus isn’t a casual name drop, either. The film reimagines the familiar Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner cartoons as an existential fable in the mold of Albert Camus, the center of the film’s love letter to the beauty and absurdity of being alive. About Sisyphus being condemned to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down over and over, Camus writes, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner is absurd and pointless: he has failed over and over, and as Kevin tells him, he could buy many birds with the settlement Acme are offering. But his apparent torment is beautiful, joyful, because his fate belongs to him. The struggle itself toward catching the Road Runner is enough to fill a Coyote’s heart. One must imagine Wile E. Coyote happy.

Coyote vs. Acme is a funny, clever, and surprisingly moving film. It combines animation and live action beautifully: cartoon Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner look right at home in the real-life New Mexico desert. There are constant riffs on Looney Tunes lore, not as fan service, but as clever background gags (my favorite: a news item about a mouse breaking the sound barrier in Mexico). The music is amazing, incorporating the Road Runner’s signature “beep beep!” as the melody in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture one moment, and to censor curse words on a Run the Jewels song the next. It’s delightful.

So the fact that Warner Bros. were willing to bin it makes the film’s depiction of monopoly capitalism seem less like satirical hyperbole and more soberly documentarian. It’s an ode to trying and failing, and trying and failing, and trying again, that Warner Bros boss David Zaslav didn’t try releasing in case it failed to make enough money. In the opening credits, a footnote to the Warner Bros. logo describes it as “a wholly owned subsidiary of Acme Corporation.” In the years since Coyote vs. Acme was made, shareholders of Warner Bros. Discovery approved a deal for the company to be bought outright by Paramount Skydance (itself created through a merger of Skydance Media, Paramount Global, and National Amusements in 2025). If Warner Bros. Discovery is the poster child of media corporations not caring what they do as long as the share price goes up, Paramount Skydance is the poster child of media corporations actively harming their consumers: recently, they’ve handed a news show as important as 60 Minutes over to Free Press founder Bari Weiss so she can fire veteran journalists and spike stories critical of Donald Trump, and fired Stephen Colbert despite being top-rated in his timeslot to make Trump happy. I’m sure they’d sell me faulty rocket roller skates if it would make Trump happy. They wouldn’t even bother, as Acme does, to keep it a secret.

Trump’s Department of Justice approved the buyout, but a federal judge has halted it again pending an antitrust trial, scheduled for March next year. Wile E. Coyote has no choice but to buy Acme products to do his work, because it’s the only game in town. As a film critic, I worry I’m headed for the same fate.