The trailer for Coyote vs. Acme — a live-action/animation hybrid that Warner Bros. Discovery shelved and tried to write off as a tax loss — racked up 25.6 million views in its first 24 hours after dropping Wednesday, setting a record for any family film trailer released by an independent studio.
Social analytics firm WaveMetrix confirmed the milestone, saying the debut surpassed the previous record held by Angel Studios’ animated feature King of Kings, which opened to $19.3 million. The film, now distributed by Ketchup Entertainment, arrives in theaters August 28.
The trailer leans hard into the film’s turbulent backstory. It opens with the on-screen text “The movie Acme doesn’t want you to see,” placing Acme Corporation directly in the role of Warner Bros. and turning the film’s near-erasure into a marketing asset.
The premise follows Wile E. Coyote enlisting a personal injury attorney — played by Will Forte — to sue Acme for decades of defective products. John Cena plays the slick corporate lawyer defending Acme, with Lana Condor co-starring as Forte’s niece. Director Dave Green, whose previous credits include Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, based the film on a 1990 New Yorker humor piece, with a screenplay by Samy Burch from a story she co-wrote with Jeremy Slater and James Gunn.
Warner Bros. Discovery announced in November 2023 that the completed film would not be released, preferring to claim a tax write-off of approximately $30 million. The crew was not informed of the decision until after production had wrapped. The move made it the third film shelved under CEO David Zaslav — after Batgirl and Scoob!
Holiday Haunt — and drew widespread industry condemnation. Warner Bros. later reversed course and allowed the filmmakers to seek buyers elsewhere, though it initially demanded $75 to $80 million and rejected bids from Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount before Ketchup Entertainment closed a deal for approximately $50 million in March 2025.
Ketchup had previously rescued another shelved Looney Tunes project, The Day the Earth Blew Up, which cleared $15.5 million globally in March 2025 — modest numbers, but enough to demonstrate the audience exists. The new film carries considerably more heat: over ten Looney Tunes characters appear, including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, and Road Runner, and the self-aware framing of Acme as a stand-in for its former studio has already generated substantial goodwill online.
