Coyote vs. Acme Passed the Tax Write-Off It Was Killed For in Nine Days

One correction before the numbers, because it is circulating: the film has not played three weekends yet. It opened on Friday 28 August and played its second frame over Labor Day, 4–6 September. The third weekend starts on Friday.

What it has done in two:

• Thursday previews: $1.7 million.
• Opening weekend: $15,914,007, second place, from 3,575 theatres. (The $15.4M and $15.5M figures still in circulation were Sunday estimates, later revised up.)
• Second weekend: $11,969,005 — down only 24.8%, on 3,727 screens.
• Domestic through 6 September: $34,473,819. International adds roughly $6 million.

A 25% second-weekend drop over a four-day holiday frame is a genuinely strong hold for a family title, and it is the single most favourable number in the file.

It cleared the write-off in nine days

The reported tax benefit Warner Bros. took when it shelved the film in November 2023 was around $30 million. The film passed $30 million domestic on or about day nine, and stood at $34.5 million on day ten.

That is not a claim that Warner Bros. left money on the table in any complete accounting. The negative cost was roughly $70 million and Ketchup will not recoup that. It is something narrower and stranger: the specific number Warner Bros. chose to convert the film into has already been exceeded by the film simply being shown to people.

And that $30 million figure deserves a flag of its own. It traces to a single trade report from November 2023 and has never appeared in a Warner Bros. Discovery filing. WBD's disclosures aggregate content impairments; no per-title number is broken out. Always attribute it.

The studio valued the same film at both premium and worthless, in the same twelve months

This is the part that does not reconcile, and the documentation is unusually clear.

In February 2024, TheWrap reported that Warner Bros. had rejected bids from Netflix, Amazon and Paramount. The asking price was $75–80 million, on a "negative cost plus" basis — the production cost plus the fees the studio had already incurred. That is an institution insisting the finished film was worth more than it cost to make.

It was simultaneously the institution that had booked the film as a roughly $30 million loss and refused to let anyone see it. The write-off required the asset to be worthless. The price tag required it to be premium. Both positions were held at once, about the same reels.

The mechanism that reconciles them is the ugly part: the deduction was worth more guaranteed than a sale was worth at risk, so the only bids Warner Bros. would accept were ones set above what anyone would rationally pay. The tell is in the same reporting: the studio refused to entertain counteroffers at all. Take it or leave it, to bidders who did not know that was what they had walked into. A Warner Bros. executive to producer Chris DeFaria, per that account: "They just want to get this behind them. They want to close the books."

What Ketchup actually paid is not known

The $50 million figure everyone quotes comes from a March 2025 trade report that Ketchup was "in talks to acquire all rights… for approximately $50 million." That is a talks-stage estimate. The follow-up story confirming the sale had closed did not restate a price, and neither Warner Bros. nor Ketchup has ever said what changed hands.

The $75–80 million ask and the reported ~$50 million sale are not contradictory, and this is the point most coverage muddles: they are fourteen months apart, and separated by the write-off being spent. In February 2024 Warner Bros. still held a deduction as an alternative. By March 2025 it had already taken it. The asset's leverage position was entirely different.

The best-reviewed Looney Tunes feature ever made is the one its owner tried to bury

• Rotten Tomatoes: 96%, average 7.9/10, from roughly 250 reviews.
• Audience score: 95%, 2,500+ verified ratings.
• Metacritic: 77. CinemaScore: A. PostTrak: 93% positive, 82% definite recommend.

The critics' consensus is worth reading in full, given who owns the characters: the film "makes a triumphant case for the Looney Tunes' modern relevance with a sense of good-natured mischief that'd make even Bugs Bunny bow."

Warner Bros. has owned Bugs Bunny since the 1930s. The verdict that the characters still work — the thing a rights-holder spends decades trying to establish — was delivered by a film that same rights-holder had concluded was worth more unseen, and it arrived three years late, after the obituaries.

Warner Bros. is no longer in the business of releasing Looney Tunes. A twelve-person company is.

Ketchup Entertainment was founded in 2011, is based in Los Angeles, and has twelve employees. Its 2026 slate now contains both theatrical Looney Tunes features in existence: The Day the Earth Blew Up (2025) and Coyote vs. Acme — both bought from Warner Bros.

The theatrical distribution of Bugs Bunny has effectively been outsourced by the characters' owner to a company with a staff you could fit around one table. And the trailer reportedly drew 25.6 million views in twenty-four hours, an independent-film record — meaning the most successful piece of Looney Tunes marketing in years was made by the company that bought the film, not the one that made it.

Who made it

Directed by Dave Green; screenplay by Samy Burch (May December), story by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater and Burch; produced by Chris DeFaria and Gunn. Live action: Will Forte, Lana Condor, John Cena, Luis Guzmán, Tone Bell, John Early. Voices: Eric Bauza as Bugs and Foghorn Leghorn, Jim Cummings, and archival Mel Blanc. Animation by DNEG and Duncan Studio; Wile E. Coyote was realised partly as a practical puppet. Shot in Albuquerque in spring 2022.

Green's statement when the film was shelved: "we were all determined to honor the legacies of these historic characters and actually get them right." Eric Bauza, accepting an Annie Award in February 2024: "I hate to be political, but release Coyote vs. Acme!" Screenwriter Samy Burch on an Oscars red carpet a month later: "we hope it will somehow find its home and not end up stuck in a vault for the rest of time."

James Gunn holds a story credit and a producer credit on the film Warner Bros. Discovery wrote off. He now runs DC Studios inside that same company.

What is still unknown

• What Ketchup paid. Never confirmed by either party.
• Whether WBD ever booked ~$30 million for this title specifically. It is one reporter's figure, not a filing.
• The exact budget — $70 million is the sourced figure; the $72 million variant has no traceable origin.
• Ketchup's marketing spend and break-even.
• Whether Warner Bros. retains any backend. Warner Bros. Pictures still appears as co-distributor and copyright holder, which suggests the sale may not have been outright — and nobody has reported on it.

That last one is the story nobody is chasing. If it is a losing year for a studio — and the wider box office arithmetic has been unforgiving all summer — then the question of who is actually collecting on the one Warner Bros. film currently over-performing is not a trivial one.