Warner Bros. Shelved Coyote vs. Acme for a $30 Million Write-Off. Three Weekends Into Its Theatrical Run, It Has Grossed $82.8 Million Worldwide

In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery parked a finished $70 million Looney Tunes movie on a shelf and took the write-off. Ketchup Entertainment then paid a reported $50 million to give it a real theatrical release, and Coyote vs. Acme has since grossed $82.8 million worldwide, landed in the domestic top five all three weekends, and become one of the most quietly satisfying stories of a very busy fall.

By Gustavo Henrique · About the author

LOS ANGELES, CALIF. · SEP 19, 2026 ~6 MIN READ

Most box office stories are just arithmetic. This one plays more like a comeback, and I've always been a sucker for those. In November 2023, Warner Bros. Discovery took a finished, $70 million Looney Tunes movie off the board and booked it as a write-off of roughly $30 million. Nearly three years later, that same movie has pulled in $82.8 million worldwide after three weekends in theaters, and over the weekend of September 11–13 it was still in the global top five while Practical Magic 2 opened at No. 1.

In Brief

Coyote vs. Acme has grossed $82.8 million worldwide through its third weekend: $47.8 million domestic and $35 million overseas, per Cartoon Brew's tally of Box Office Mojo and Comscore estimates. It finished fifth domestically and fourth globally that weekend.
Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the movie in November 2023 as a reported $30 million write-off. Ketchup Entertainment bought it for a reported $50 million and released it August 28 — its biggest opening ever, at just over $15 million against $3.1 million for its previous Warner rescue.
The reception has been warm: mid-90s scores on Rotten Tomatoes and an A CinemaScore. What nobody can say yet is whether it's actually profitable, because published break-even estimates run from about $125 million to $175 million.

How a finished movie almost vanished

Coyote vs. Acme started life as an HBO Max Original. Dave Green directed it from a screenplay by Samy Burch, working from a story she developed with James Gunn and Jeremy Slater, and Gunn's Troll Court Entertainment produced. The premise borrows from Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker essay "Coyote v. Acme," which pictures Wile E. Coyote taking the Acme Corporation to court over a lifetime of defective products. Will Forte, Lana Condor and John Cena star, sharing the screen with an animated coyote inside a live-action world. Production wrapped in New Mexico in the spring of 2022.

Then came November 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery decided not to release the finished film at all and, according to the reporting at the time, took a tax write-off of about $30 million on it. The backlash was loud enough that the studio eventually reversed course and let the filmmakers shop the movie around. Variety reported that Amazon Prime Video, Apple and Netflix all screened it, and none of them made a deal. The buyer turned out to be Ketchup Entertainment, an independent distributor founded in 2012, which Variety said was closing in on rights for a price around $50 million; Cartoon Brew later marked the completed acquisition on March 31, 2025.

Ketchup had done this once before. Its earlier Warner Bros. hand-me-down, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, opened in March 2025 to $3.1 million and finished with $8.8 million domestically, according to Deadline. Nobody was going to mistake that for a hit, but it proved that a small distributor could get a shelved animated movie into theaters and keep the lights on.

The people who wouldn't let it disappear

The Hollywood Reporter published a long feature in August on how the film got saved, and the details are the best part of the story. Producer Chris DeFaria told the magazine that the team moved fast to make sure the shelving never got read as a verdict on the movie's quality. They wanted people to understand that Warner's decision was about the balance sheet and had nothing to do with whether the film was any good. Filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller spoke up publicly, fans mounted a campaign that mixed online pleas with in-person appearances at industry events, and private screenings put the finished movie in front of press and industry people. Cartoon Brew was one of the outlets invited, and it reported back in November 2023 that the movie was finished and very good.

That same THR piece has a detail I can't stop thinking about. The movie includes an animated version of Peter Lorre, whose likeness turned up in several classic Warner Bros. cartoons. Director Dave Green said studio executives wanted that character swapped for someone more recognizable, and he described Lorre as a very deep cut. He and Burch held their ground, and Lorre appears near the start of the finished film. Somebody fought for a joke that most of the audience will never catch, and that tells you a lot about the kind of movie this is.

Three weekends of numbers, and what they can't tell us yet

Coyote vs. Acme opened August 28 on 3,575 screens and made an estimated $15.4 million for the weekend, including $5.3 million on Friday. That put it second behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day, per The Hollywood Reporter, and it earned an A CinemaScore. Its Rotten Tomatoes score sat at 95% among critics that weekend, and reviewer Frank Scheck called it "a hilarious delight" in THR's write-up. Worldwide it debuted at $23.9 million, good for fifth place globally, according to Cartoon Brew.

The holds are where it gets interesting. Over Labor Day weekend it took in roughly $12 million, a drop of about a quarter, and climbed to third place domestically behind The Odyssey and Spider-Man. The third weekend was softer, $6.2 million and a 48% decline, though that comparison is against a holiday frame. That left it at $47.8 million domestic and $35 million overseas, or $82.8 million worldwide, and still inside the global top five despite the arrival of Practical Magic 2.

Whether that adds up to a profit is honestly a harder question than the headlines make it sound. Warner spent about $70 million making the movie, but that's Warner's money now, not Ketchup's. Ketchup's outlay was the reported $50 million purchase price plus marketing, and theaters keep a slice of every ticket, so a worldwide gross isn't the same as revenue in Ketchup's pocket. Outlets that have tried to work out a break-even number land anywhere from about $125 million to something closer to $175 million, depending on their assumptions. Ketchup hasn't published its books, so I'd treat all of those as educated guesses. The movie also faces a crowded stretch: Resident Evil opens this weekend, and next weekend brings Heart of the Beast, Forgotten Island, Primetime and a re-release of Avengers: Endgame, per Variety. This weekend's numbers arrive Sunday.

Commentary: Gustavo Henrique

I don't want to turn this into a victory lap over Warner Bros., even though it's tempting. A tax write-off and a box office run get measured differently, and nobody outside that building knows what the spreadsheet looked like in 2023. What I can say is that the audience got a vote it wasn't supposed to get, and it used it. People made noise, showed up at events, and then bought tickets to a Looney Tunes movie on the tail end of summer, which is not a sure bet for anyone. There's something quietly hopeful in that. A finished movie that people love can still climb out of the vault, if enough of them refuse to let it stay there.

The part I'll be watching is what happens next. Ketchup did the rescue in about the least glamorous way possible, with a modest marketing push and a wide release into a summer crowded with giants, and it still ended up in the domestic top five all three weekends. If there's a lesson, I don't think it's that studios should never shelve anything. It's that a completed movie is a rare, expensive thing and deserves a second look before it goes in the ground, and independent distributors are getting good at giving it one. Whether this particular movie ends up in the black, I don't know yet, and the murky break-even math means anyone who sounds certain is guessing. But I know which version of this story I'd rather be writing: a movie nobody was supposed to see, playing in theaters, holding its own against Spider-Man and a Sandra Bullock–Nicole Kidman reunion. That's a good week for movies.

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