The folks who tried to kill ‘Coyote vs. Acme’ should be in jail

Hello hello, Popculturology pals! Welcome to the Friday newsletter. Are you ready for a jam-packed edition full of news, trailers and — most importantly — my thoughts on the much-anticipated, back-from-the-dead Coyote vs. Acme?

If you haven’t had a chance yet to upgrade your subscription, what better time than now?

Justice for Wile E. Coyote

That any movie gets made is a tiny miracle. Coyote vs. Acme is two miracles.

It’s a miracle that a Looney Tunes movie with this much heart and love for its characters exists in 2026. We saw a few years ago with Space Jam: A New Legacy that this franchise can easily be warped into something soulless.

And it’s a miracle that Coyote vs. Acme defied the greed of wealthy executives who wanted to throw the finished film away in exchange for a few more million dollars to add to their already overflowing pockets.

Coyote vs. Acme should not exist. But it does. And we are all the luckier for it.

If you’re unfamiliar with the story of Coyote vs. Acme, here’s the short version. After the merger that created Warner Bros. Discovery and installed David Zaslav as the head of one of the world’s oldest movie studios, news broke that WBD had yanked Coyote vs. Acme from the calendar and had chosen to kill the finished film in exchange for a reported $30 million tax write-off.

The movie was done. It had been tested and gotten high marks. But to Zaslav and WBD, that extra $30 million was worth the cost of crushing the beautiful work done by director Dave Green, screenwriter Samy Burch, the cast, the crew, the animators, the special effects teams, the editors, the composers and everyone and anyone else who had poured years of their lives into Coyote vs. Acme.

But then came word early last year that Ketchup Entertainment, a very real production and distribution company, had made a deal with WBD to save Coyote vs. Acme. For $50 million, Zaslav’s studio would allow Ketchup to bring this wonderful film to the world.

And on Thursday night, I sat in a theater — thankfully with a decent crowd — and got to laugh along as Wile E. Coyote and Will Forte stood up to a greedy and deceitful corporation.

It should be a crime what Warner Bros. Discovery tried to do to Coyote vs. Acme.

Zaslav shouldn’t be on the verge of walking away with almost $900 million if the sale of WBD to Paramount Skydance goes through. He should be shunned by the industry. He should be a pariah. There should be no reward for treating a movie like Coyote vs. Acme the way he did.

I know I said this a few weeks ago with The End of Oak Street, but please go see Coyote vs. Acme in theaters this weekend.

Like with The Naked Gun last summer, I felt it was my duty to see Coyote vs. Acme in theaters. If people don’t buy tickets to movies like these ones, the studios are going to stop making them. (In Coyote vs. Acme’s case, the studio did everything it could to not release this movie in the first place.) Take your family. Take your friends. Take people you only kind of like?

Let’s show the folks who tried to keep this gem of a movie away from us how wrong they were. Beep beep.

• 📖 Keep Chasing That Bird: The Oral History of Coyote vs. Acme (Alan Siegel, The Ringer): “Good movies should be seen, and good movies make money. But I also think from a sort of mercenary standpoint, if you can activate a community around an idea and you can remain on the right side of that idea, they’ll reward you. And I want that to be the case.”
• 📖 How the Anvil Was Nearly Dropped on Coyote vs. Acme (Jason T. Bailey, The New York Times): “That sense of shock was felt throughout the industry, prompting an outpouring of outrage from filmmakers and fans over what they saw as the studio’s willingness to shelve a finished film for the sake of its short-term bottom line.”

‼️ THE BIG STORIES

Please clap for this Encore

Like billions of other Popculturology readers, I gleefully sat in a theater in April 2019 and cheered as Captain America summoned Mjölnir and finally uttered the phrase “Avengers ... assemble.” That’s probably an unparalleled moment for me in terms of being in a movie theater.

But that moment is gone. And no matter how much Disney and Marvel try, they’re not going to recapture it. At least not with Avengers Endgame: Encore (no one caught that the colon is in the wrong place over there, huh?), the September re-release of Avengers: Endgame.

I haven’t seen a theater count for Encore, but it seems like Disney snuck this one into whatever spots theaters have open. There are zero evening showtimes at my usual theaters, with my opening Thursday choices being shows at 1 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 4 p.m.

The promotion for this limited engagement is leaning heavily on Tony Stark, his snap and the idea that if “you mess with time, time tends to mess back.” The goal is that Encore, complete with a couple minutes of new footage, bridges the divide between Endgame and the upcoming Avengers: Doomsday. I don’t know if that’s gonna work. (Watch)

• Lego Avengers, assemble: We also got a pretty decent Lego-ified version of the first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. Maybe Marvel will also do this for the D23 trailer that actually got people excited about Doomsday. (Watch)

Hoult halts, Harington hails Harry

The Omnicosm has a standing policy of not covering Harry Potter. (Seriously.) It doesn’t matter if it’s a trailer for the HBO show or a bag of Goldfish crackers based on the movies. But I’ll make an exception for the news that Nicholas Hoult dropped out of playing Gilderoy Lockhart in the upcoming HBO series, with Game of Thrones star Kit Harington taking his place.