The first trailer for Coyote Vs. Acme is out, and the movie that Warner Bros. once tried to bury is now headed to theaters on Aug. 28. The finished film, which the studio attempted to scrap in 2023, was saved after a social media uproar and later picked up by Ketchup Entertainment for distribution.
The trailer puts Wile E. Coyote in court, hiring billboard accident lawyer Kevin Avery to sue the Acme corporation over defective products. Will Forte plays Avery, while John Cena appears as Buddy Crane, Acme’s slick corporate counsel. The clip also brings in Sylvester, Tweety and Foghorn Leghorn, signaling that the film is leaning hard into the classic cartoon universe that inspired it.
The project has an unusual path to the screen. Warner Bros. greenlit Coyote Vs. Acme in December 2020 as a production for HBO Max, then moved to shelve the completed film in 2023 as part of a $115 million write-down. The decision became one of the first headline-making calls under CEO David Zaslav and drew sharp pushback from fans and filmmakers who argued the studio was killing a movie that was already done.
That backlash mattered because the film was not a speculative gamble or a half-finished salvage job. It had already been completed when Warner Bros. tried to pull it from release, and the studio’s own later explanation for such decisions was blunt: executives said they had to choose whether to take some films and release them in theaters while spending another $30 million or $40 million to promote them, and that those calls took real courage. In this case, the public reaction helped force a different outcome.
Now the test is in the market. Ketchup Entertainment has the film, the first trailer is making the case for it, and the release date is set. If the movie lands with audiences on Aug. 28, it will look less like a discarded title than a studio mistake that was reversed only after the backlash got too loud to ignore.
