Coyote vs. Acme Review: A Lawsuit Comedy That Earns Its Verdict

Yes, Coyote vs. Acme is worth watching, and it is worth watching in a cinema with the sound turned up. Dave Green's live action and animation comedy treats seventy years of the Coyote and Road Runner chase as a legal proceeding, and it lands the joke and the argument in the same scene. Will Forte carries it and John Cena undercuts him. The gags land hard enough to cover the runtime. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 96 percent from 299 critic reviews and Metacritic at 77 from 46, both checked on October 22, 2026.

Spoiler-free verdict: Watch it. A 103-minute, PG Looney Tunes comedy that turns Wile E. Coyote into a plaintiff, pairs Will Forte with John Cena, and mixes live action with animation. Rotten Tomatoes says 96 percent from 299 critic reviews and Metacritic says 77 from 46, checked October 22, 2026. You need no plot summary before pressing play.

What Coyote vs. Acme is about

The movie opens on a cartoon Dr. Lorre being hunted by armed soldiers, and Wile E. escaping with the help of dehydrated boulders, which Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com said had him laughing already. Then the chase itself, the sequence the picture is really about: rocket shoes, magnets and a missile, and the Road Runner away again with the coyote flat on the ground below.

That is the setup for a lawsuit. Wounded at home, Coyote sees a billboard for a law firm asking whether you have been in a cartoon accident. The firm is Avery, Jones and Maltese, in Albuquerque, and its name is a tribute to Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese. Its advertising pitch is genius, and the joke of the movie is that Wile E. has been saving his rocket shoes in a magic box and sending the whole box to Acme by mistake. Faulty rocket shoes are worth about $300 in a settlement. The box is worth a lawsuit.

Kevin Avery (Will Forte) is the lawyer, and he is a failing one, a late-night billboard lawyer with a case he cannot afford to take. His niece Paige (Lana Condor) works the case with him. Across the aisle is Buddy Crane (John Cena), Acme's lead attorney, who used to be on Kevin's side. Acme itself belongs to Foghorn Leghorn, and the case turns on what the company has been doing in that lab for the last half century.

The backdrop matters, because the movie keeps pointing at it. Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times explained that in 2023 Warner Bros. dropped the film from its release calendar, an uproar followed, and Ketchup Entertainment picked it up for distribution. She also led with the reason to be grateful: "We almost didn't get to see 'Coyote vs. Acme,' which would have been something of a tragedy." The picture takes the shot too, opening with a card announcing that Warner Animation Group is "a wholly owned subsidiary of the Acme Corporation."

Cast and performances

Forte is the film's straight man and its best argument for going to see it. Tallerico compared him to Bob Hoskins in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the foil for the animated chaos, and wrote that "he strikes just the right tone as Kevin Avery, himself a victim of a system that seems designed to valorize people like his former ally Buddy Crane." Cena plays the opposite, and Tallerico found the two of them working, with Forte embracing his everyman awkwardness and Cena leaning into his alpha male screen presence.

Condor gets the film's best comic invention in Paige, the assistant who is smarter than the lawyer and better with people. Tone Bell plays Sal Maltese, Martha Kelly plays Dottie Jones, and Luis Guzmán is Judge Troppogrosso, a no-nonsense, no-silly-stuff judge.

Eric Bauza voices the whole Warner cartoon canon in one credit, including Foghorn Leghorn, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Tweety and the Road Runner.

What works

The gags. Tallerico's verdict was that "it's really the non-stop verbal and sight gags that elevate 'Coyote vs. Acme'", and the screenplay, by Samy Burch from Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker piece, runs on them. There is a courtroom sketch artist drawing a rocket shoe that chases the judge around the bench. There is a line about a man who ran off with his secretary, except that the secretary was a penguin. Stephen Porzio at joe.ie had the sharpest description of the script: "basically: What if Erin Brockovich or The Verdict but with Looney Tunes?"

The balance of the two worlds. The animation is not a costume on the live action, and the live action is not a straight man standing next to a cartoon. Wilkinson summed the film up as "one barrel of unhinged delights", and the paper ran its review as a Critic's Pick.

Odie Henderson at The Boston Globe gave it 100 and wrote that "the best part of all is that 'Coyote vs. Acme' is a superb piece of filmmaking, a loving tribute to the most hapless of all Looney Tunes characters and the many fans who love him."

What doesn't

The mystery plot keeps coming back. This is Tallerico's central complaint and it is fair: "its only real flaw is how often it returns to the Acme mystery plot, repeating some plot points more than it needed to". The corporate-conspiracy material needs less screen time than the law-firm material, and the film keeps over-feeding it.

The running time. Tallerico thought it just feels a bit longer than it should be, and Porzio agreed that the picture might lack some of the edge and the laugh-out-loud humour of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

The joke about the studio. J. Hoberman at Artforum was the sharpest critic of the picture and pointed at the framing device: "However well received, the movie is hardly a blockbuster. In its anti-corporate, relative commercial purity Coyote vs. Acme serves as a corrective to a previous Warner Bros. product, namely the egregious Space Jam." Sheraz Farooqi at CinemaDebate put the same limit more gently, noting that the fact the film exists at all says something about the power of filmmaking, while stopping short of calling it a masterpiece.

What audiences say

All figures checked on October 22, 2026. Rotten Tomatoes has the film at 96 percent from 299 critic reviews, with a 94 percent Popcornmeter from more than 2,500 verified ratings, and its critics consensus reads: "A daffy satire that's equal parts heart and wily humor, Coyote vs. Acme makes a triumphant case for the Looney Tunes' modern relevance with a sense of good-natured mischief that'd make even Bugs Bunny bow." Metacritic has a Metascore of 77 from 46 critic reviews, labelled Generally Favorable, split 89 percent positive, 9 percent mixed and 2 percent negative, plus a user score of 8.1 from 218 user ratings. Letterboxd's member average is a weighted 3.82 out of 5 from 631,057 ratings, with 313,793 written reviews. TMDB has it at 7.5 from 770 votes. Every figure in this section was checked on October 22, 2026, and IMDb was bot-blocked throughout, so none of its numbers are quoted here.

Both crowds are happy and the two numbers say the same thing in different units. A 3.82 out of 5 from more than 631,000 ratings puts the audience on the same side as the critics.

Box Office Mojo's figures, read on October 22, 2026, put the film at $60,101,763 domestic and $40,834,212 international for $100,935,975 worldwide, from a United States release on August 28, 2026 that opened with $15,914,007. TMDB's record for the same title gives a $72 million budget, distributed by Ketchup Entertainment.

Where to watch Coyote vs. Acme

There is no subscription streaming in the United States. JustWatch, which checked 376 streaming services on October 22, 2026, lists the film as a rental at $19.99 on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home, with Plex also taking a rental, and a digital purchase at $24.99 on Amazon Video, the Apple TV Store and Fandango At Home. It is also on disc, and there is no free streaming option anywhere. TMDB's United States watch provider list agrees, and Rotten Tomatoes lists a release date (streaming) of September 29, 2026. The certificate is PG. The run time is 103 minutes, which Rotten Tomatoes lists as 1 hour 41 minutes and The New York Times as 1 hour 43 minutes.

Current availability, cast details and member reviews sit on our Coyote vs. Acme streaming options and member reviews page.

Verdict

Is Coyote vs. Acme worth watching? Yes, and see it with other people, because a courtroom gag about a rocket shoe needs a room to land in. Dave Green made the picture he wanted rather than the picture a studio would approve, the animation and the live action lock together, and Will Forte plays a tired lawyer with more heart than the picture needs. The mystery plot is overfed and the runtime could lose ten minutes without anyone noticing. It is still a Looney Tunes picture with a legal argument at its centre, and it earns its resolution.

Spoiler warning: the ending of Coyote vs. Acme

Wile E. Coyote loses the case. That is the film's decision and it is the reason the picture works. In the federal courtroom, the Road Runner testifies for the coyote and tells the court that the two of them are friends, that the chases have been a game for seventy years and never an act of predation. The coyote is left silently shocked and moved, and the last shot of the movie has the pair running again.

The verdict goes against him on a technicality, because he is the only plaintiff. But the trial has put ACME's business on the record: Foghorn Leghorn confesses that the company has been running experiments on the Looney Tunes characters, and the reason the gadgets worked so reliably at hurting them is that hurting them was the design brief. The toons were the test subjects. Anyone who found out was put away in an institution or dropped in a hole. The public hears the evidence and, at first, sides with Foghorn.

The win comes from the crowd. The other Looney Tunes characters, impressed by Kevin's work, hire him for a class action against ACME. That shifts what the public believes, the government opens an investigation, and Foghorn Leghorn and Buddy Crane are arrested. Kevin and the gang get to trap both of them in the cage built for the Road Runner, which is the joke the whole picture has been pointing at.

And the movie keeps its promise about the two of them. The chase resumes. Meep meep.