BRYAN PRESTON: I saw the movie that Warner tried to delete: Coyote vs. Acme.
Warner Bros. had a movie it spent $70 million to create, finished in 2022. It brought some big names together – James Gunn as writer and producer, stars John Cena and Will Forte, and even bigger names in Bugs Bunny, Wile E. Coyote, and all the other classics from Looney Tunes. Warner didn’t just launch production on this film, it went through the entire process, and had a finished work that was ready for theaters. It was called “Coyote vs. Acme,” pitting the hapless Wile E. Coyote against the megacorp from which he’d bought so much failed gear over the decades.
But thanks to perverse tax incentives and a difficult climate for major movie releases, Warner decided to do the unthinkable: It was going to delete this finished movie. Not just shelve it. Destroy it.
Will Forte, who plays Coyote’s attorney in the film, appeared on Jay Mohr’s podcast, called it “a very frustrating story.”
“So we make this movie. The script is really fun. And then, we went through the process of making this movie, and we made an even better movie than this great script.”
Because half the film is animated with composited cartoon characters, anvils and other tropes, post-production was a long process. But it got through all that, Forte says, and they were called to a screening.
“After all the animation, they’re finally ready to show it to the cast. They called us up on a Tuesday night. Said, ‘OK we’re gonna show it to you next Tuesday. It’s testing really well, we’re very excited about it.’ The next day I get a call that Warner Bros. is going to shelve it. Just wants to take a tax loss.”
The cast still got to see the movie. Forte said he assumed that if Warner was shelving it, “It must be not as good as these guys said. But they saw it, and it’s ‘great.’
“Which made it even more frustrating… It was nuts.”
As Rob Long writes in this month’s issue of Commentary: Coyote Vs. Studio.
Given the position Warner Bros. was in at the time, the guys who shelved it weren’t wrong, and it is physically painful for me to write these words: The studio executives weren’t morons. In fact, they were doing the math correctly. The standard rule of thumb is that six out of 10 studio movies never earn back what was spent on them. An NYU Stern study found that the median studio-financed film delivers about 27 percent ROI. The median independently financed film returned negative 13 percent.
I didn’t know what those numbers meant—I’m a writer; I don’t know how money works—so I looked it up. Mature software companies post returns on investment capital in the 20–25 percent range. McDonald’s posts in the 22–26 percent zone.
So: A McDonald’s—a building that sells hamburgers to people who already know exactly what they’re going to order before they walk in—returns roughly 24 percent. A mature software company, selling code it had to write only once, returns 20–25 percent. But only four times out of 10 does a studio movie—which involves movie stars, visual effects, marketing campaigns, and a two-year production process that could be derailed at any point by a pandemic, a strike, or an actor who loves Hamas—return 27 percent. You can get the same return renting out a drive-thru window as you can financing a movie. But the drive-thru doesn’t require you to guess, 18 months in advance, whether the culture is going to want to watch a cartoon coyote and his lawyer. The smart move is to put down the camera and pick up the french-fry basket.
But the entire premise of the movie business—the only reason anyone has ever agreed to finance it—is that occasionally something as odd and small as a cartoon coyote suing a company that makes atomic-powered roller skates turns out to be a moneymaker. You don’t get into show business because it’s a good bet. You get into it because it’s fun. Warner Bros. wanted the predictability of a bank and the jackpot of a casino, and you cannot, in the end, have both.
Which is why Warner Brothers may well be absorbed into the Ellison empire, and if so, that’s possibly a wrap for the industry’s company town: Maybe Paramount-Warner SHOULD Leave L.A.
— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) September 18, 2026