Coyote vs. Acme is a 2026 live-action and animation hybrid directed by Dave Green, written by Samy Burch from a story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch, and adapted from Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker column, which was written as a straight-faced legal complaint filed by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Corporation. It runs 103 minutes and stars Will Forte as Coyote's inexperienced lawyer, John Cena as Acme's attorney, Lana Condor in support, and Eric Bauza voicing the Looney Tunes. Gunn also produced. It was released by Ketchup Entertainment on 28 August 2026, roughly three years later than it should have been, and it is an absolutely solid film.

I want to be upfront that my only real criticisms come from picking at it, and largely from measuring it against my personal favourite in this specific genre, which is Space Jam. That is an arbitrarily high bar that I have set for myself and have no intention of lowering, so take my reservations in that spirit.

The cast is perfect throughout. Forte is ideally suited to playing a well-meaning man badly out of his depth, and Cena is excellent as the opposing counsel. But the genuine achievement here is the animation and integration work. The character designs are outstanding, and the way the animated characters physically occupy and interact with the live-action world is consistently convincing in a way these hybrids often are not. Objects have weight, characters have presence, and nothing feels pasted on.

The sound design deserves particular credit, because it matters enormously in a film like this. So much of what makes a Looney Tunes gag land is the specific noise it makes, the timing of an impact, the whistle of a falling anvil, the exact pitch of a device failing catastrophically. Get that wrong and the whole thing collapses. This film gets it consistently right, and I will be singing its praises for some time.

And then it caught me completely off guard. There is a moment where Road Runner asks Coyote whether he is coming back, and I was not remotely prepared for it. I did not sit down in front of a film about a cartoon coyote filing a product liability suit expecting to be blinking hard in a dark room, and yet that is precisely where I found myself. The film earns that moment too, rather than manufacturing it.

Throughout, it cuts in footage from the original shorts, and those sequences are a nostalgia bomb sponsored by Acme. They also prompted a slightly melancholy realisation, which is that we do not really make simple cartoons like that anymore. Eight minutes, a single premise, escalating with beautiful internal logic, no franchise scaffolding, no world-building. That format has quietly vanished from the landscape, and I genuinely think we are poorer for its absence.