Why does Warner Bros want to erase its buzzy film Coyote Vs Acme?

We have been here before. A year and a half ago, it emerged that Warner Bros was set to shelve its latest take on Batgirl. Despite costing more than $70 million (€65 million), the nearly completed project, deemed disappointing, was put in the bottom drawer and forgotten about.

Now the studio is doing the same thing to its cartoon-live action hybrid Coyote Vs Acme. A story by Drew Taylor in The Wrap, referencing “a source close to the movie”, tells us that Warners would not “even announce that they hadn’t found a home for the movie. They would unceremoniously delete it. Never to be seen again.”

It is one thing for a creator to annihilate his own work. It is another thing altogether for a studio (this does not seem to have happened yet, we should repeat) to erase the work of directors, animators, actors, musicians, set designers ... Good luck directing potential future employers to work you’ve done on a film that no longer exists.

A tax write-off looks to be at the heart of the decision. News first emerged that Warners was planning to disappear the project last November. Following media outcry, the studio reversed its original decision and invited the filmmakers to flog Coyote Vs Acme elsewhere. But The Wrap reports that Warners “wanted something in the ballpark of $75 million-$80 million ... [and] wouldn’t allow the interested studios to counter Warner Bros’ offer.” It was “take it or leave it”. That doesn’t seem to have worked out.

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“It’s a write-off for them,” says Kramer in an episode of Seinfeld. Challenged by Jerry, he admits that he doesn’t know what this means. “But they do. And they’re the ones writing it off.” I don’t really know what it means either. But they do. And they’re the ones writing it off.

One shouldn’t need to ascertain if the work is any good before getting in a blind rage. Had the film of Cats been wiped it would have saved movie press two hours of pain, but that would still have been an act of philistinism. It is the principle that matters. And yet. There is something particularly aggravating about the Coyote Vs Acme case. Word on Batgirl was not good. In contrast, Coyote Vs Acme sounds as if it could, to use a phrase from highbrow film theory, turn out to be totally awesome. It has already secured a footnote in cultural history. The picture was originally down to be released on July 21st, 2023. When Warners moved the title, it placed Barbie in the empty space. Barbenheimer was born and you haven’t stopped hearing about it since (as this sentence confirms).

The Coyote is, of course, Warners’ famous Wile E of that ilk. Acme, as you shouldn’t need to be told, is the fictional mail-order firm from which he buys the bombs, anvils, rocket sleds and giant rubber bands used in his Sisyphean efforts to capture the perennially irritating Road Runner. Samy Burch, currently Oscar-nominated for May December, based his screenplay on a splendid New Yorker article by Ian Frazier from 1990. The piece, still available online, details a faux legal action taken by Wile E, referred to as “Mr Coyote” throughout, against the apparently unreliable supplier of hardware, weaponry and ironmongery. His complaints relate to “certain products which did cause him bodily injury due to defects in manufacture or improper cautionary labelling”. Both rocket skates and rocket sled have caused particular inconvenience.

[ Kapow! ‘Irredeemable’ Batgirl movie unexpectedly cancelled in final stages ]

The core joke is to do with how legal language copes with the absurd and extreme. (The Irish comic Eleanor Tiernan exploits a similar effect in her sketches as a TV court reporter named Ursula McCarthy.) One delicious section details Mr Coyote’s condition after a mishap with Acme’s “spring shoes”. The accident caused him to “expand upward and contract downward alternately as he walked, and to emit an off-key, accordionlike wheezing with every step”.

The film sees gentle Will Forte play Mr Coyote’s lawyer and bear-sized wrestler John Cena act for the defendant. Good casting. All reports suggest that initial test screenings had gone down well. “Coyote Vs Acme is wonderful,” Phil Lord, Oscar winner for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, commented. “Hilarious smart existential and moving and makes this all-time character more relevant than ever.”

The thing is as mystifying as it is enraging. We always knew it was show business not show friendship, but, in this case, the voodoo economics feel beyond the understanding of mortal man. The journalist Matt Zoller Seitz summed it up best by referencing a great Mel Brooks film. “The biggest difference between the plot of The Producers and what happened to Batgirl and Coyote vs Acme is that in The Producers, the public got to see the play,” he wrote in rogerebert.com.

It’s a write-off, Matt. They write it off.