“Coyote vs. Acme” is officially on the market.
Days after Warner Bros. announced it was shelving the finished Looney Tunes-inspired film as a $30 million tax write-off, the studio is letting the filmmakers shop Coyote vs. Acme to other distributors. Puck, an industry newsletter, and Deadline first reported that Amazon Prime Video, Apple and Netflix are setting up screenings to acquire the film, which wrapped shooting in 2022 and was slated for a theatrical release.
Amazon and Netflix have been active buyers during the pandemic as traditional studios siphoned off films for extra cash, but nothing has been ironed out for ‘Coyote vs. Acme’. Sources close to the negotiations say the film hasn’t been screened yet. In such cases, the rights go to the highest bidder. It’s unclear whether another company would want to buy a film that Warner Bros. deemed unworthy of release on the big or small screen. But streaming services always need fresh content, especially of the family-friendly variety, to keep subscribers. And the writers’ and actors’ strikes (the second of which finally ended on Friday) have halted production for much of the summer and autumn, delaying projects in the pipeline.
“Coyote vs. Acme,” a $70 million live-action-animation hybrid starring John Cena and Lana Condor, is the third film in two years that Warner Bros. has scrapped because of tax incentives. A similar situation occurred just over a year ago when Warner Bros. dropped the $90 million DC adventure “Batgirl” and the kid-friendly “Scoob! Holiday Haunt”. The studio positioned that decision as a one-time tax write-off, which made the news of “Coyote vs. Acme” even more devastating to the creative community.
All three films were greenlit under former studio chief Jason Kilar, and two of them, Batgirl and Scoob, were made for HBO Max. Kilar’s successor, Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav, has shifted the studio’s priorities back to theatrical and a spokesperson said these films didn’t fit with the company’s new creative direction.
Director Dave Green expressed his disappointment at Warners’ decision to pass on Coyote vs. Acme, a film he had been working on for three years. “Along the way we were embraced by test audiences who rewarded us with fantastic reviews,” the filmmaker wrote on social media. “I am more than proud of the final product.”
