Coyote vs Acme review: the A CinemaScore says the hybrid comedy works

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. Spoiler light on purpose. Premise only. The rest is a ticket. Per boxofficemojo.com.

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.

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

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.

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. 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.

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. That is commerce. 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. Kate Erbland's IndieWire Grade B called it clever and snappy. The Globe's Odie Henderson went four stars. It needs to say the critics were not grading a rescue mission. They were grading a comedy.

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. 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.

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How we made this: researched and drafted with AI assistance. Sources are linked in the piece.