The MontyVerse

The Coyote That Refused to Stay Down

Wile E. Coyote might be one of the biggest losers in the history of animation. For more than 75 years, he has ordered rockets, catapults, explosives, giant magnets, dehydrated boulders, and enough questionable merchandise from Acme to bankrupt a small nation, all in the obsessive pursuit of a bird he has absolutely no chance of catching. Every plan ends the same way. Something goes wrong, the Road Runner escapes, and Wile E. is crushed, blown up, flattened, or dropped off the side of a cliff.

Then he gets back up.

That simple loop has been the punchline for decades, but Coyote vs. Acme finds something surprisingly beautiful inside of it. Director Dave Green takes the very thing that has always made Wile E. Coyote ridiculous and reframes it as the thing that makes him heroic. This is a character defined not by his constant failure, but by his absolute refusal to let failure stop him.

Perseverance is the beating heart of Coyote vs. Acme, an imaginative, genuinely hilarious, and surprisingly heartfelt movie that understands these characters on a level far deeper than nostalgia. It is a pure shot of whimsy, filled with the manic energy and cartoon absurdity you expect from Looney Tunes, but there is a real soul underneath all that silliness.

And considering everything this movie went through just to reach a theater, that message now feels almost impossibly appropriate.

The Case Against Acme

The premise is one of those ideas so obvious that it is amazing it took this long to become a movie. After spending years buying products from Acme that routinely explode, malfunction, or violently turn against him, Wile E. Coyote finally decides that maybe he is not entirely the problem. Maybe Acme is.

So he sues them.

The idea comes from Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece “Coyote v. Acme,” which treated decades of Road Runner slapstick like evidence in a very serious product-liability case. Green, screenwriter Samy Burch (working from a story credited to Burch), James Gunn, and Jeremy Slater take that wonderful premise and build an actual underdog legal story around it, with Will Forte’s Kevin Avery serving as the attorney tasked with representing our battered coyote against the corporate machine.

What makes the movie work is how seriously it takes that ridiculous setup.

There is an alternate version of Coyote vs. Acme that plays everything like a spoof. The courtroom exists purely to set up jokes, Looney Tunes characters wander through for applause breaks, and the entire movie becomes a feature-length exercise in recognizing things from your childhood.

Thankfully, Green has far more ambition than that.

The legal story is treated with the structure and sincerity of an actual underdog courtroom drama. Wile E. has been hurt. Acme sold him the products that injured him. He wants someone to take responsibility. The comedy comes from applying that level of seriousness to a world where one of the pieces of evidence might be a rocket strapped to a pair of roller skates.

The film never becomes embarrassed by the Looney Tunes of it all, nor does it feel the need to constantly wink at the audience. Everyone commits to the world, which allows the absurdity to speak for itself.

That has always been the secret sauce of these characters. Wile E. Coyote does not know he is in a cartoon. As far as he is concerned, painting a tunnel onto the side of a mountain is a perfectly reasonable plan that should absolutely work. The movie understands that and is all the better for it.

Finding the Character Inside the Punchline

The biggest challenge facing Coyote vs. Acme was never figuring out how to put Wile E. Coyote into live action. We have had the technology to do that for years. The difficult part was figuring out how to turn him into the emotional center of a feature film without destroying the simplicity that made him work in the first place.

Green absolutely nails it.

Wile E. remains largely silent, and that is one of the smartest decisions in the movie. The character has spoken before in his long history, particularly in his encounters with Bugs Bunny, but this film pulls primarily from the Road Runner version of the character. He communicates through expression, body language, signs, and the kind of physical performance that made Chuck Jones’s cartoons so readable.

The animation therefore has to do a tremendous amount of acting.

Wile E.’s face can move from arrogant confidence to complete devastation without a word being spoken. His ears drop. His posture changes. His eyes tell you exactly when he realizes his newest plan is about to end in unimaginable pain. We have understood those emotions for decades because the original cartoons were masters of visual storytelling, and the movie smartly trusts that language instead of replacing it.

The difference is that those same expressions are now being used to generate empathy.

Wile E. has always been obsessive. He has always been arrogant. He has always been his own worst enemy. Coyote vs. Acme does not erase any of that to make him more sympathetic. It simply asks us to reconsider what we already know about him.

He fails constantly.

He also never quits.

His biggest character flaw and his greatest strength are one and the same.

And I love that.

It feels like such a simple realization, yet it completely changes how you look at a character who has existed for generations.

Two Losers Walk Into a Courtroom

Will Forte is the perfect human actor to build this story around.

His Kevin Avery is not introduced as some brilliant attorney waiting for the right case to rediscover his passion for justice. He is a mess. He is a man whose life has not gone according to plan, and Forte has always been exceptionally good at finding humanity in characters who would be very easy to dismiss as pathetic.

That makes Kevin and Wile E. natural partners. They are both losers, but I mean that in the nicest way possible.

Both characters know what repeated failure feels like. Both are used to watching their plans fall apart. Both have reasons to stop trying. Their relationship gives the movie an emotional foundation because Kevin gradually stops looking at Wile E. like some absurd cartoon animal sitting in his office and begins to understand what this case actually means to him.

Wile E.’s silence makes that relationship even more interesting. Kevin cannot properly represent him until he learns how to read him. He has to understand what Wile E. is trying to say without Wile E. ever sitting down and explaining himself.

It is such an elegant way to build a human relationship around a character who cannot simply deliver a monologue explaining his feelings.

Forte brings the warmth necessary to sell that relationship, and he knows exactly when to play into the insanity surrounding him and when to pull everything back. His performance acts as the bridge between the cartoon world and the emotional sincerity Green is chasing.

Lana Condor provides another grounding presence as Paige Avery. She has the difficult job of existing in a world where completely impossible things are happening around her without reacting like she has accidentally wandered into another movie. Condor plays Paige with enough conviction that the cartoons feel like an accepted part of this reality rather than visual effects being added around the actors.

Then you have John Cena as Buddy Crane, who may be the human actor having the most Looney Tunes fun.

Cena’s size already gives the character an exaggerated silhouette next to Forte, and he uses that presence perfectly. Buddy carries himself with the confidence of a man who knows the institution behind him is much larger than anyone standing on the other side of the courtroom. Cena knows how far to push that arrogance without turning the character into a walking sketch. In a movie filled with cartoon characters, he occasionally feels like the biggest cartoon of them all.

Making Looney Tunes Feel Like Looney Tunes

The animation is another area where Coyote vs. Acme could have easily fallen apart.

Classic Looney Tunes characters are built around graphic simplicity. Their expressions are exaggerated, their silhouettes are immediately readable, and their bodies can violate every known law of physics if the joke requires it. Taking that language and translating it into a dimensional live-action environment creates an immediate problem.

The more realistic you make Wile E. Coyote, the less he feels like Wile E. Coyote. Green and the animation team seem to understand that realism is not the goal. Personality is.

The characters maintain the expressive posing and elasticity of the original cartoons while still feeling like they inhabit the same physical environments as the actors. Shadows, reflections, and physical interactions help sell the illusion, but the thing that impressed me most is that the animation remains funny.

That sounds obvious for a Looney Tunes movie, but comedy in animation is all about timing:

Wile E. sees something.

He processes it.

He realizes he has made a horrific mistake.

There is a pause.

Then the universe destroys him.

Coyote vs. Acme understands the importance of that pause.

The movie has a wonderfully manic pace when it needs one, but it also knows when to let a visual joke breathe. It does not constantly cut away from the setup in search of another gag. The animation and editing work together to let the physical comedy build naturally.

It feels much closer to the spirit of the classic shorts than simply dropping recognizable characters into live action ever could.

That same philosophy extends to the cameos. There are plenty of familiar faces here, and longtime Looney Tunes fans are going to have a blast spotting them, but the movie rarely feels like it is stopping dead to point at them. They are part of the world.

That distinction is important because nostalgia can be an incredibly useful ingredient, but it cannot be the meal.

Coyote vs. Acme knows the difference.

The Sound of Obsession

Steven Price’s score might be one of my favorite elements of the entire movie.

Looney Tunes has always had an unusually close relationship with music. The classic shorts do not simply have music playing underneath them. The music participates in the comedy, punctuating movement, reactions, impacts, and tiny physical gestures.

Price honors that tradition while also taking on the much stranger assignment of emotionally scoring Wile E. Coyote.

Somehow, it works.

The score can bounce alongside the animation one moment before pulling back and treating Wile E.’s exhaustion with genuine sincerity the next. That movement mirrors the entire tonal philosophy of the movie. Something can be completely ridiculous without the emotion beneath it being fake.

The Road Runner’s “meep meep” even starts to feel like something closer to a psychological motif. After decades of chasing this bird, the sound might as well be permanently embedded in Wile E.’s brain.

It is hilarious, but it also makes perfect sense. That combination sums up the movie remarkably well.

Acme Always Wins

The corporate satire underneath Coyote vs. Acme is sharper than I expected.

Acme has always been a hilarious piece of unexplained Looney Tunes logic. There is apparently a corporation willing to ship military-grade explosives and experimental technology directly to a coyote living alone in the desert, and the cartoons never really stop to question how this business remains operational.

The movie finally does.

There is something inherently funny about examining Acme through actual corporate logic, but the more the film pulls on that thread, the more pointed the joke becomes. Wile E. is Acme’s perfect customer precisely because he keeps failing. Every broken product leads him to buy another product. Every disaster creates another sale. His obsession is profitable.

That turns the relationship between Wile E. and Acme into something much more interesting than “company sells bad products.” The system benefits from keeping him trapped inside a cycle he cannot escape.

And then reality gave the movie an entirely new layer.

In 2023, Warner Bros. announced that it would shelve the completed Coyote vs. Acme rather than release it. The film had already been made and screened, yet there was a very real possibility audiences would simply never get to see it.

The irony writes itself.

A movie about a powerless little guy fighting an enormous corporation suddenly found itself crushed underneath an enormous corporation. The important part is that the filmmakers did not create this story in response to what happened. The movie came first.

Reality simply decided to become part of the metaphor.

The Movie That Got Back Up

I do not think Coyote vs. Acme deserves praise simply because it survived. That distinction matters.

A fascinating production history does not make a movie good. The people who fought for its release were fighting for audiences to have the opportunity to make that decision themselves.

Now we can, and Coyote vs. Acme is really damn good.

It is funny without relying solely on references. There is real emotion here without the movie becoming overly sentimental, and it respects the history of Looney Tunes without treating that history like something too precious to play with.

Most importantly, Green never treats these characters like valuable pieces of intellectual property that need to be carefully positioned for the next thing. He treats them like characters. That should not feel revolutionary, but in modern franchise filmmaking, sometimes it does.

The movie understands why Wile E. Coyote has survived for 75 years.

It is not because he wins. We watch him because we know exactly what is going to happen and somehow want to see him try anyway.

He draws up the plan, he places the order, the package arrives, and everything goes horribly wrong. But once the smoke clears, there he is, ready to do it all again.

There is something beautiful about that kind of perseverance. Maybe foolish, definitely obsessive, but beautiful nonetheless.

Coyote vs. Acme somehow found the character buried inside one of animation’s greatest running jokes, then accidentally lived out the exact same lesson on its journey to the screen.

The movie got made, got crushed, and somehow, it got back up.

The Verdict

Dave Green takes the eternal punchline of Wile E. Coyote and finds the hero buried underneath all the soot, craters, and Acme shipping labels. Will Forte gives the movie a wonderfully human center, the animation retains the expressive personality of the classic cartoons, Steven Price’s score bridges sincerity and insanity, and the corporate satire gives the whole thing a sharper edge than its colorful exterior suggests.

But what stays with me most is the strange thematic symmetry the movie picked up on its journey to the screen.

Wile E. Coyote has spent his entire life being crushed by a universe that seems fundamentally opposed to letting him succeed.

He keeps getting back up anyway.

Maybe he never caught the Road Runner, but Coyote vs. Acme finally made it to the finish line. And after everything it went through, I am very happy to say it was well worth saving.