Coyote vs Acme (2026)

I went into Coyote vs. Acme with almost no recent frame of reference. I grew up on Looney Tunes the way most people my age did, but it’s been years since I sat down with any of it, and I wasn’t sure how much that gap would matter for a movie built entirely around one of its characters. It turns out it barely mattered at all, because the movie isn’t really banking on nostalgia to do the work. It’s banking on a legal comedy premise that’s funny enough to stand on its own, and on Will Forte, who is doing some of the best work I’ve seen from him.

The setup is simple and brilliant: Wile E. Coyote, sick of decades of rocket skates and self-guiding bombs blowing up in his face, sees a TV ad for Kevin Avery, a down-on-his-luck lawyer who specializes in small settlements for cartoon characters wronged by Acme products. Avery is the kind of guy who takes the quick payout every time because he’s terrified of losing, and when Acme offers Coyote fifty grand to make the case disappear, Avery is thrilled. Coyote is not. He tears up the check, and with his niece Paige pushing him to actually fight instead of settle, the case turns into a real lawsuit against Acme’s entire business model, eventually uncovering a program called Project Sisyphus that suggests the company’s failures were never accidents at all.

That reframe is where the movie gets more interesting than it needed to be. For decades, Wile E. Coyote has been the embodiment of failure that never sticks, a character who gets flattened, blown up, and dropped off cliffs and just keeps going, no matter how many times the universe tells him no. It’s easy to read that as a joke about futility, and the cartoons always played it that way. But putting him in a courtroom flips the framing entirely. His failures stop being a personal flaw and become evidence of someone else’s negligence, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching a character we’ve spent years laughing at get to say, essentially, none of this was actually my fault. It’s a small but real shift in how we’re asked to see him, from a punchline about persistence to a case study in what happens when persistence gets exploited by a system that profits from it.

Coyote never speaks in the movie, which means the emotional weight of every scene between him and Avery has to come from Forte, and Forte carries it. He plays Avery as genuinely worn down, someone who’s built his entire career around not trying too hard because trying too hard means you can actually lose, and watching that armor crack over the course of the case is more affecting than I expected from a movie about a cartoon coyote suing a fictional hardware company. Forte’s comedic instincts are still all over the performance, but he dials the manic energy way down from what you’d expect if your only reference point is MacGruber, and the restraint is what makes it work. He’s reacting to a character who can’t talk back, which means he has to generate both sides of the emotional exchange, and he pulls it off without ever making it feel like a gimmick.

John Cena shows up as Buddy Crane, Acme’s slick head counsel and Avery’s old law school friend turned professional enemy, and he leans hard into the role of a guy who’s clearly enjoying being the villain. It’s not a subtle performance, but it doesn’t need to be, and Cena’s willingness to be ridiculous fits the tone of the movie perfectly. Lana Condor as Paige, Avery’s idealistic intern, ends up being the movie’s moral center, the one pushing everyone else to actually care about the outcome instead of settling for whatever’s easiest, and she keeps the story moving in the stretches where the legal plotting could have dragged.

Visually, the hybrid of live action and animation is handled well enough that I stopped noticing the seams pretty early on. The classic gags are all there, and there are enough cameos from the wider Looney Tunes cast to reward people who do have that deeper history with the franchise, but they’re folded into the story rather than treated as the whole point. I could see some of the plot beats coming, particularly around how the corporate conspiracy resolves, but it didn’t bother me. This isn’t a movie trying to surprise you with its structure. It’s a movie trying to make you laugh and then sneak in a little bit of feeling once you’re not looking for it, and it does both of those things well.

I’d recommend this one pretty broadly, honestly more to people who like a good odd-couple comedy than to people looking for a deep dive back into Looney Tunes specifically. If you grew up with the cartoons, there’s plenty here for you, but you don’t need that history to enjoy it. I didn’t have it, and I had a great time anyway.