Coyote vs. Acme is a Warner Bros. comedy that spent nearly two years as one of Hollywood's most notorious unreleased films before the distributor Ketchup Entertainment bought it out of the studio's vault and opened it in theaters on August 28, 2026. The premise plays like one of its own sight gags: Wile E. Coyote, still hand-drawn the way generations of Looney Tunes animators rendered him, hires a washed-up lawyer, played by Will Forte, to sue the Acme Corporation over decades of exploding products and collapsing anvils. Three weeks in, Coyote vs. Acme is still one of the widest bookings at Los Angeles movie theaters this week - a detail that says almost as much about its second life as its opening weekend did.
The Film Warner Bros. Almost Wrote Off
Warner Bros. Discovery shelved Coyote vs. Acme in November 2023, folding a finished, test-screened film into the same tax write-off strategy that had killed Batgirl the year before. The move drew unusual public anger for a film almost nobody had seen, and Warner Bros. reversed course. Ketchup Entertainment, the distributor behind The Day the Earth Blew Up, acquired it in March 2025 for roughly $50 million against a reported $70 million budget. The film premiered at San Diego Comic-Con on July 25, 2026, over two and a half years after Warner Bros. first tried to erase it, and opened wide five weeks later.
What the Reviews Actually Say
The reception has outperformed the backstory rather than merely surviving it. Coyote vs. Acme holds a 95% score on Rotten Tomatoes across nearly 190 reviews - the strongest score of any live-action Looney Tunes film to date - alongside a Metacritic score of 77. The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck ranked it among the stronger live-action-animation hybrids in years. Forte plays the lawyer exhausted rather than manic, Eric Bauza's voice work carries Coyote's physical comedy without softening it, and John Cena and Lana Condor keep the courtroom scenes from reading as connective tissue. Not everyone agreed - Variety's Owen Gleiberman found its corporate-liability satire softer than the premise promises.
The Widest Run of Anything New in Los Angeles This Week
In Mood's data, Coyote vs. Acme is booked at 22 of the 115 Los Angeles movie theaters tracked in this week's screening calendar - a wider footprint than any other title that opened in the past two months, ahead of Hope, the next-widest recent release, at 20 theaters. Only two bookings run wider still, Resident Evil's 30-theater spread and Practical Magic 2's 30, both already covered elsewhere in Mood's current review run. For a film once filed away as a write-off, a 22-theater spread three weeks into release reads as a concrete kind of vindication.
The Verdict: A Better Case for the Coyote Than for Its Own Pacing
What holds up is the central conceit: a 2D character who has never spoken a line, dropped into a live-action legal drama, his physical logic treated as evidence rather than a gag reel. The film is at its best when Bauza's Coyote testifies through demonstration, replaying his own failed schemes for a jury that has to take a cartoon's word for it. It loses momentum in the second act, when a corporate-conspiracy subplot around Acme's executives asks for more plot than the physical comedy can carry. The sharpest idea it has - that a company can market failure as innovation for decades and face no consequence - gets stated rather than sharpened. It earns its ending more than it earns the twenty minutes before it.
Still Wider Than the Revival Houses
Los Angeles runs more repertory programming than almost any other market Mood tracks, and this week's schedule shows it. Pan's Labyrinth, back for a run tied to its 20th anniversary, logs more total screenings than Coyote vs. Acme, 131 to 99, but across only 11 theaters, concentrated in specialty and arthouse rooms. Coyote vs. Acme's spread reaches suburban multiplexes from Chino to Redondo Beach as easily as single-screen houses like The Culver Theater in Culver City - depth in a few rooms against breadth across many. AMC Burbank Town Center 6, a six-screen theater inside a shopping mall, sits at the opposite end of that spread.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Coyote vs. Acme worth seeing in a movie theater rather than waiting for streaming?
The hand-drawn Coyote sequences and physical-comedy set pieces are built for a big screen, and reviewers have credited the theatrical presentation for how the animation reads against live-action. Its 95% Rotten Tomatoes score across nearly 190 reviews backs that up.
Why was Coyote vs. Acme almost never released?
Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the finished film in November 2023 as part of a tax write-off strategy, the same approach that had already killed Batgirl. Public backlash pushed the studio to sell instead - Ketchup Entertainment acquired distribution rights in March 2025 for roughly $50 million, and the film opened in August 2026.
What else is currently playing in Los Angeles movie theaters?
In Mood's data, Los Angeles is tracking 951 titles across 115 movie theaters this week, mixing new releases with real repertory depth: The Transformers: The Movie, from 1986, holds 116 screenings across 12 theaters, playing alongside 2026 releases rather than in a separate niche slot. Full listings are on Mood's Los Angeles movie theaters page.
Where can I find showtimes for Coyote vs. Acme in Los Angeles?
Mood tracks showtimes across all 22 Los Angeles theaters currently running Coyote vs. Acme, updated as venues add or drop screenings.
Full showtimes for Coyote vs. Acme, along with the rest of this week's Los Angeles movie theaters lineup, are listed on Mood.
