Coyote vs. Acme earned an A. The grade is the confession that the joke worked.

I am not reviewing the vault. I am reviewing the movie people actually paid to sit through. Coyote vs. Acme, directed by Dave Green, opened wide on Friday, August 28, 2026, through Ketchup Entertainment after Warner Bros. shelved a finished live-action and animation hybrid and Ketchup dragged it back into theaters. Friday's Movies desk covered the write-off saga. Saturday's Movies desk used the cartoon as a box office foil. Today is Sunday, August 30, and the Reviews desk has a narrower job: what the film is, what the grades say, and whether the product on the screen earns the confession those grades are making. Spoiler light on purpose. Premise only. The rest is a ticket.

The premise you can print on a stub is clean. Wile E. Coyote, after decades of Acme merchandise that exploded, collapsed, or otherwise refused to catch a bird, teams with billboard accident lawyer Kevin Avery, played by Will Forte, and sues ACME. Corporate counsel Buddy Crane, played by John Cena, is the human anvil on the other table. Lana Condor plays Paige Avery. Eric Bauza handles a stack of Looney Tunes voices. The rating is PG. Runtime lands around 101 minutes, roughly one hour and forty-one minutes, depending on which listing you trust. That is the object. Hybrid. Family comedy. Cartoon predator in a real courtroom. Not a limited series. Not a write-off spreadsheet. A movie.

The grades arrived faster than most studios buy a second weekend of ads. CinemaScore gave Coyote vs. Acme an A, the exit poll that asks opening-night audiences how they feel on the way out. Deadline, Cosmic Book News, Comic Basics, and TheWrap all logged that A. Reporting across those outlets frames it as the first Looney Tunes theatrical feature to earn one. TheWrap and Cosmic Book News further note that among Warner Bros. produced animated features, only The Iron Giant, which TheWrap dates to 1998, and The Lego Movie in 2014 had previously posted an A. I am not inventing a CinemaScore archive. I am repeating the public claim as reported, because the claim is the Reviews argument: the people who bought tickets graded the joke as working.

The A is not a press release. It is a confession that the joke landed in a room with popcorn.

Rotten Tomatoes, as of this desk's pull and ScreenRant's weekend reporting, sits at roughly 95 percent with critics and Certified Fresh, with a verified audience score around 94 percent. ScreenRant calls that audience number the best Looney Tunes audience score on the site's board, beating Space Jam, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Space Jam: A New Legacy, and even 2025's The Day the Earth Blew Up. Deadline's Saturday box write-through adds Screen Engine PostTrak at about 93 percent positive and about 82 percent definite recommend. Those are not the same instrument. CinemaScore is a letter on the sidewalk. Rotten Tomatoes is a critic stack plus a verified crowd. PostTrak is recommend intent. Three different thermometers. Same weather report: the room liked the movie as a movie.

I want that sentence loud before anyone turns this into another lawsuit brief. I have not claimed a private screening diary as my only evidence, and I am not going to invent gags I did not log frame by frame. What I have is the public critical record from the week of release, the exit grades, and the fact that Ketchup put the film in roughly 3,500-plus theaters and watched an estimated $13 million to $14 million opening weekend become the distributor's domestic record, more than quadruple the prior high from The Day the Earth Blew Up. Deadline's Saturday AM chart had Coyote around $14 million for the three-day. TheWrap's Saturday estimate sat in the $13 million to $14 million band. That is commerce. Reviews is grades. The grades say audiences did not show up only to punish a studio. They showed up and then told the pollsters the joke worked.

What is the joke, if we keep it spoiler light? Ian Frazier's 1990 New Yorker satire Coyote v. Acme already knew the American punchline: a desert predator asks a court to notice that the catalog sold him weapons disguised as gadgets. Green, with a screen story shared by James Gunn, Jeremy Slater, and Samy Burch, and a screenplay by Burch, turns that brief into a hybrid that has to do the hard part Roger Rabbit made look easy. A mute cartoon has to share a two-shot with Forte without looking like a tennis ball on a stick. Cena has to play corporate counsel as if the Acme logo were a wrestling entrance. The desert still has to feel like Chuck Jones geography even when the asphalt is photographed. Early notices from IndieWire, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe, which Friday's Movies desk already cited, treated that craft as real rather than charitable. Kate Erbland's IndieWire Grade B called it clever and snappy. The Globe's Odie Henderson went four stars. A Reviews Sunday does not need to re-litigate every pull quote. It needs to say the critics were not grading a rescue mission. They were grading a comedy.

Critics graded a comedy. Audiences graded a night out. The A is where those two reports meet.

That distinction matters because rescue narratives can inflate expectation until the product cannot breathe. ScreenRant's Alex Harrison, in the outlet's own review, gave the film six out of ten and argued the road to release built impossibly high expectations. That is a fair Reviews posture. A movie that survives a write-off attempt does not automatically become a masterpiece because it exists. Existence is the industrial miracle. The A, the 95, the 94, and the PostTrak recommend rate are a different claim. They say that once the lights went down, the hybrid did the work of a family comedy: people laughed, people followed the mute predator, people walked out willing to tell a clipboard the night was worth it. I am not going to invent a star rating I have not earned in a chair for every reel. I am going to treat the exit grades as the product confessing out loud.

The hybrid grammar is the product feature, not a gimmick footnote. Dave Barclay's life-size Coyote stand-in on the Albuquerque set, which Cartoon Brew and The Ringer's oral history described during the press cycle, exists so Forte and Cena have an eyeline. DNEG's animation and the 2D work have to sell weight when a rocket skate fails. Steven Price's score, flagged in multiple reviews, has to let a beep feel like a choir joke without turning the theater into a museum. None of that is a spoiler. It is why a CinemaScore A on a Looney Tunes theatrical is rare enough that outlets are reaching back to Iron Giant and Lego Movie for company. Family audiences are harsh in exit polls when the toon feels like a commercial wearing ears. An A means the ears felt like a character.

Forte's Avery is the human hinge. Reviews keep describing him as the billboard lawyer who puts injury copy on the highway and then has to learn a case can be a cause. Condor's Paige is the intern pressure. Cena's Buddy Crane is the undefeated counsel who treats a coyote like a liability spreadsheet. Luis Guzman is on the bench. Tone Bell, P.J. Byrne, Martha Kelly, and the rest fill the firm and the gallery. I am stopping the cast roll before it becomes a credit crawl. The Reviews point is simpler: the humans have to play straight enough that the coyote's silence reads as stubbornness instead of a missing ADR track. Opening weekend audiences, if you trust CinemaScore and PostTrak, are saying that bargain held.

Compare that to what Looney Tunes theatrical hybrids have usually earned from the same instruments. Space Jam's audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, per ScreenRant's table, sits far below Coyote's debut. Back in Action took a CinemaScore B-plus in its day and a much softer audience percentage now. Space Jam: A New Legacy opened into a streaming-era shrug. The Day the Earth Blew Up, Ketchup's earlier rescue, posted a strong critic run and an 88 percent audience score on ScreenRant's board, then opened to about $3.1 million. Coyote's 94 percent audience debut and roughly $14 million Ketchup record are not the same sentence as 'people were mad at Warner.' They are the sentence 'people liked this one more than the last several times the brand asked for a theatrical night.' That is a Reviews finding even if you never open a spreadsheet.

People did not only buy a rescue. They graded a night, and the night got an A.

I will nod at the shelf without reopening Friday's brief. Warner finished the picture, then treated it as a tax event in 2023. Ketchup acquired worldwide rights in a deal Deadline pegged around $50 million, spent thrifty P and A that Deadline hears around $10 million, and opened August 28, 2026. UK audiences saw it a week earlier. Comic-Con saw footage and a screening. The marketing leaned into the wound, including the Tax Day teaser language that has been widely reported. That is enough industrial context for a Reviews page. The lawsuit outlived the studio strategy. The Reviews question is whether the movie outlived the meme. The grades say yes.

Box office is weather, not theology. An estimated $13 million to $14 million opening against Spider-Man: Brand New Day's fifth weekend and The Odyssey's seventh is a Ketchup ceiling, not a Marvel floor. Deadline logged demos that skewed general audience, male leaning, heavy in the 25 to 34 band, with kids under 12 a smaller slice than a pure four-quadrant fantasy. That matters for a Reviews desk because it tells you who is confessing. This A is not only parents dragging toddlers. It is grown Tunes fans and animation people, some of them towing kids, telling CinemaScore the hybrid felt finished. Word of mouth with an 82 percent definite recommend on PostTrak is how a thrifty campaign tries to buy a second weekend without a studio's social machine. RelishMix, via Deadline, even measured the social reach as thinner than a major studio family release. The grades are doing marketing the budget could not.

What I will not do is review Dog Stars, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Whisper Man, Resonance, or The Sinking City 2 as the primary subject of this Sunday. Other desks already filed those frames. Coyote vs. Acme as an experience is the assignment. The experience, boiled to Reviews language, is this: a PG hybrid about a mute coyote hiring a small claims lawyer to sue the corporation that sold him junk, directed by Green, released by Ketchup, running about an hour and forty-one minutes, and earning an A, a Certified Fresh critic stack near 95, an audience score near 94, and PostTrak recommend intent in the low eighties. That is a coherent product grade. It is also a punchline that fits the cartoon. Persistence was the theme. The audience answered with a letter that Looney Tunes theatricals had not posted before.

Recommendation, stated as a Sunday Reviews desk verdict rather than a private reel-by-reel diary I have not published as a shot list. See it if you want the hybrid craft and you trust exit grades more than vault mythology. See it if ScreenRant's best-in-franchise audience claim and Deadline's PostTrak numbers match the hunger for a family comedy that does not apologize for slapstick. See it if Erbland's clever-and-snappy lane or Henderson's four-star lane sounds like your night. Skip it if Harrison's six-out-of-ten expectation tax is your honest mood, and you needed the meme more than the movie. Skip it if you only wanted another thread about the write-off. The write-off already lost. The A is what remains when the lights come up.

That is the Reviews argument for August 30. Coyote vs. Acme is a Dave Green live-action and animation hybrid, PG, about an hour and forty-one minutes, with Forte, Condor, Cena, and a silent coyote who finally gets a docket. Ketchup put it in theaters on August 28. Opening weekend estimates sit around $13 million to $14 million, a distributor record. CinemaScore A. Rotten Tomatoes critics about 95 and Certified Fresh. Audience about 94 per ScreenRant. PostTrak about 93 positive and 82 definite recommend per Deadline. Friday argued the lawsuit. Saturday argued the chart. Sunday argues the grade. The A is the confession that the joke worked. Buy a ticket if you want to hear it in a room instead of a comments section.