The plan to quietly kill Coyote v. Acme blew up in David Zaslav’s face | The Verge
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The plan to quietly kill Coyote v. Acme blew up in David Zaslav’s face
Swift public outcry gave the movie a chance to speak for itself.
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Under David Zaslav’s leadership, WBD got very into the practice of shelving its own nearly completed projects in order to cash in on subsequent tax write-offs. To help deal with its looming debt and operating costs, the studio killed Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s live-action Batgirl feature and the Scoob! Holiday Haunt movie from Michael Kurinsky and Bill Haller. Though people weren’t exactly foaming at the mouth for a Christmas-themed Scooby-Doo prequel, Batgirl’s cancellation came as a surprise given how much the movie cost to produce (reportedly $90 million) and the fact that it was intended to be part of Warner Bros.’ last interconnected universe of movies based on DC’s comics. The DCEU was already plagued with problems long before the Batgirl situation, but it was still wild to see a studio chucking its movies into the garbage in order to make some guaranteed cash.
Like Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Coyote v. Acme was nearly finished when WBD first announced in 2023 that it had decided to put the film on ice. But by then, the public had become more aware of Zaslav’s — who said axing Batgirl took “courage” — willingness to throw his creative partners under the bus. As potential audience goers began lamenting the news online, filmmakers started instructing their representatives to cancel meetings with the studio for fear that their work, too, might be tossed into wood chipper. But rather than just chalking all of this up to be The Way Things Are Now™, people — who had already watched as HBO jettisoned Sesame Street and Westworld — saw this situation as being emblematic of the way that Zaslav has turned WBD into a company that prioritizes profits over the creation of art.
The initial backlash to Cotoye v. Acme being shelved was clearly getting to WBD by November of 2023 when the studio began offering other production houses like Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount (more on this in a bit) the chance to buy the movie’s distribution rights. For some reason, WBD turned down multiple proposals from parties who were interested in releasing Coyote v. Acme under their own brands. For a while, it seemed like WBD might have just been putting the movie up for sale without having any real intention of agreeing to a solid deal. But in 2025, Ketchup Entertainment — the same studio that bought the rights to WBD’s The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie in 2024 — swooped in with a successful bid to put Wile E. Coyote’s latest adventure on the big screen.
In the time since then, Zaslav has gotten even more wrapped up in the madness of a potential WBD acquisition by David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, and Ketchup Entertainment has been gearing up to make good on its promise of giving Coyote v. Acme a proper theatrical debut. The movie’s first trailer hit the internet this week like the rare Acme weapon that actually works the way it’s intended to. People have been hooting at the idea of WBD trying to punt a movie about unscrupulous megacorporations, hollering about how much they love features that blend 2D animation with live action, patting themselves on the back for turning Coyote v. Acme into a cause. Director Dave Green thanked fans for “all of [their] unwavering support,” and Ketchup has been cleverly capitalizing on all the drama by marketing the film as something Acme (read: WBD) doesn’t want you to see.
Meanwhile, WBD’s shareholders have voted to approve Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition offer, and while Zaslav isn’t completely guaranteed to walk away with a hefty chunk of change, it’s very possible that he’ll be exiting the company with a sizable golden parachute. The timing of it all makes it seem like no amount of cancelled projects could have kept WBD from needing to seek out a buyer for itself, and Coyote v. Acme highlights all of the good will that Zavlav and his colleagues chose to pass up.
The next chapter of this story is where things are going to get very interesting because it will send signals to the larger entertainment industry about what kind of studio head Zaslav was and how much stock to put in movie outrage. It is somewhat difficult to get a sense of how much people’s excitement about Coyote v. Acme is about the movie itself as opposed to their disdain for Zaslav. Especially if it means thumbing your nose at an overpaid executive, it’s easy to say that you’re hyped to see the Wile E. and Bugs Bunny back in theaters. But none of WBD’s last three Looney Tunes features — Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Day The Earth Blew Up — were box office hits, and one has to wonder whether the same would be true for Coyote v. Acme if the studio had just released the movie itself.
If the movie does end up being a massive success, it will be a coup for Green and the rest of his creative team. But it will also become a prime example of how Zaslav’s approach to running WBD ultimately led to the studio fumbling an easy win for itself. In all likelihood, Zaslav probably doesn’t care much about what potential theatergoers think about his leadership. If the Paramount merger goes through, Zaslav will move on and be in a position to continue his career elsewhere. Paramount — which has been dealing with the fallout of The Last Airbender animated movie leaking online — and other studios will be paying attention to how Coyote v. Acme performs this summer because it will reflect how much online chatter translates to real -world profits. This could end up being another Morbius fiasco where viral memes don’t get people flocking to theaters. But if Coyote v. Acme becomes a hit, fans may find themselves reminded that their voices really do have some power to shake up how the entertainment industry does business.
For what it’s worth, the handful of people who have already seen Coyote v. Acme have given it exceedingly glowing reviews. Test audiences reportedly liked it, and animation hit-makers like Into the Spider-Verse co-directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller applauded it for being smart, funny, and charming.
If you’re fully locked in with this story, you really owe it to yourself to check out Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker story “Coyote v. Acme” that the movie is based on. In contrast to the film’s trailer, Frazier’s story takes a somewhat more serious approach as it details the multitude of injuries the plaintiff sustained while using the defendant’s products over the years. It’s good, dry humor that really makes you appreciate that someone took it seriously enough to put it in theaters.
Now that Paramount is one step closer to absorbing the entirety of WBD, it’s a good time to look back at all of WBD’s previous mergers that seemed like very good ideas (to the executives and shareholders, at least) right up until things started to go sideways. Ellison could end up breaking the WBD merger curse, but history says that he’s going to have one hell of a time doing it.
Variety has a riveting report alleging that Zaslav isn’t all that happy about how Ellison essentially bullied WBD into accepting its acquisition bid after the studio first announced it wanted to sell to Netflix.
If you want to hear more about how Coyote v. Acme’s shelving devastated the team who worked on the movie, you should check out this Indie Wire piece.
You should definitely read my colleague Liz’s piece from last December about how David Ellison’s father Larry — the cofounder and chairman of Oracle — helped finance the WBD acquisition deal by backstopping it with the family’s $1 billion+ trust.
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