‘Coyote vs. Acme' finds a new home after being shelved by Warner Bros.
NEW YORK (AP) — For once, things are working out for Wile E. Coyote.
After being shelved by Warner Bros. in 2023, the Looney Tunes film 'Coyote vs. Acme' has found a new home. Ketchup Entertainment announced Monday that it acquired worldwide distribution rights to the film for an undisclosed sum.
The deal gives new life to one of the three fully completed films that Warner Bros. elected to take a tax write-off on rather than release. The tactic, which followed a change in leadership at Warner Bros. coming out of the pandemic, was widely disparaged by creatives and fans, alike. The other two shelved movies — the $90 million DC Studios production 'Batgirl' and the animated 'Scoob! Holiday Haunt' — remain unreleased.
But 'Coyote vs. Acme' will be salvaged from the dustbin. Ketchup Entertainment plans a theatrical release at an unspecified future date.
'We're thrilled to have made a deal with Warner Bros. Pictures to bring this film to audiences worldwide,' Gareth West, chief executive of Ketchup Entertainment, said in a statement. ''Coyote vs Acme' is a perfect blend of nostalgia and modern storytelling, capturing the essence of the beloved Looney Tunes characters while introducing them to a new generation.'
Directed by Dave Green and based on a New Yorker article by Ian Frazier, 'Coyote vs. Acme' follows Wile E. Coyote in a lawsuit against Acme Corporation for the many faulty products that failed to catch him the Road Runner. The live-action animated hybrid stars John Cena and Will Forte.
Deadline earlier reported that Ketchup paid about $50 million for the film, which cost $70 million to produce. Ketchup, a distribution company launched in 2012, also recently released another Looney Tunes film jettisoned by Warner Bros.: 'The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie.' In three weeks of release, it's grossed $8.2 million in domestic ticket sales.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Gizmodo
Report: Ben Stiller May Bring ‘The Twilight Zone' Back to Movies
It's been years since Paramount+'s TV reboot of The Twilight Zone quietly ended, but the anthology series may be coming back to the big screen. Per Jeff Sneider, Warner Bros., which holds film rights for the franchise, is looking at Severance executive producer and lead director Ben Stiller to direct a new film. Various creatives have tried at it over the years, including Matt Reeves and Joseph Kosinski. But according to Sneider, Stiller may be the guy WB and Applain Way have needed to finally get the ball rolling on this film. The actor-director is a fan of the anthology show and previously cited it as an influence on Severance, up to and including a season two episode named after Twilight's 1960 episode 'The After Hours.' The 1983 Twilight Zone movie had four segments, but this new film will reportedly just have one. Sneider claims one source told him the story would be supernatural and center on a fighter pilot assigned to a rocket that achieves time travel, which delivers him to a utopia 125 years in the future. The reporter stressed this could easily change: while Stiller's allegedly been on board for 'roughly six months,' it remains an open writing assignment (OWA), meaning any screenwriter could come on board and run with that premise or propose their own new take. Sneider also acknowledged that if Stiller is directing this movie, it'll be a ways out. Along with the third season of Severance, he's starring in a fourth Fockers movie due holiday 2026 and directing the 1970s crime drama Bag Man. Still, we'll report more on this potential Twilight Zone movie as news about it comes out.
Forbes
4 hours ago
- Forbes
What The Streaming Wars Reveal about Bad Strategy
Rooftop party and viewing in Los Angeles. Created By Michelle Loret de Mola using Midjourney Max just pulled a classic Hollywood move: the reboot. Two years after Warner Bros. Discovery stripped away the iconic 'HBO' from its name, they've decided to bring it back. Max will now be called HBO Max…again. This will be the streaming service's fifth name change. They were HBO Go in 2008, then HBO Now in 2015, then HBO Max in 2020, then just Max in 2023, and now (hopefully, finally) back to HBO Max. On the face of it, this just seems like bad brand management. But there's a bigger lesson to be learned here. These changes were more than just rebrands: each new name came along with a fundamentally different business strategy. HBO succeeded when it relied on its own creativity. And then stumbled when it tried to copy competitors. For decades, HBO had a unique playbook. It focused on a combination of recently released movies, exclusive live events, and original series. While broadcast television depended on advertising, HBO used a subscription model. HBO played a leading role in what has been called 'television's second golden age.' It greenlit shows that shaped the culture, like The Sopranos, Sex and The City, The Wire, and Game of Thrones. At its core, HBO's playbook was all about the curation and production of prestige content. Of course, that was before the consultants came in. In June 2018, Time Warner, HBO's parent company, was acquired by AT&T for $85 billion. Shortly after completing the acquisition, John Stankey, the new CEO of WarnerMedia decided to change the playbook. To Stankey, HBO's tightly curated, time and resource-intensive model didn't seem scalable. He wanted a broader, more mass market platform with more content, more engagement, and more subscriber growth. In a town hall to HBO employees, Stankey emphasized, "We need hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month. We need hours a day. You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes. I want more hours of engagement." Stankey believed substantially more content would increase viewer engagement, and that would provide more data, in turn enabling monetization through advertising and subscriptions. In short, HBO's new strategy would be to stop being HBO and start trying to be Netflix. And who wouldn't want to be Netflix? Netflix was the company that slayed Blockbuster, reinvented TV distribution, disrupted Hollywood, and rewrote the rules of what it meant to be a media company. Today, Netflix enjoys a half trillion dollar market cap that is double that of Disney and 22 times that of Warner Bros. Discovery. There was just one problem with that playbook: HBO isn't Netflix. What followed was seven years of wandering in the wilderness, as HBO struggled to emulate the Netflix model. Frustrated with the new strategy, HBO CEO Richard Plepler walked away in 2019. HBO's original content was folded into Warner Bros.' extensive library of content and relaunched as HBO Max. And while global subscriptions for HBO Max reached 69.4 million by October 2021, much of that growth came because we were all locked up at home during a pandemic. Unable to drive further growth from its acquisition, AT&T spun off WarnerMedia to create Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022. And things got even worse. Warner CEO David Zaslav doubled down on the Netflix playbook by dropping the HBO name altogether and flooding the platform with content from Discovery and Food Network. Suddenly, the platform that brought you The Wire was pumping out shows like Dr. Pimple Popper and My 600-lb Life. The end result of this copycat strategy was external confusion, internal demoralization, and financial underperformance. In recent months, Warner Bros. Discovery execs have begun to concede that they simply can't compete head-to-head with Netflix. As JB Perrette, the president of streaming, said in an interview, 'We started listening to consumers saying, 'Hey, we don't really want more content, we want something that is different, we want to end the death scroll with something that is better.'' It turns out no one wants a second-rate Netflix when they can already subscribe to the real thing. They want an alternative. They want HBO. Over the past year, Max has regained momentum by focusing more on quality, adult shows like The White Lotus and The Pitt instead of trying to provide a firehose of entertainment for everyone. The return to being called HBO Max is a long-overdue recognition that this is where its future lies. WarnerMedia made the same mistake with other properties, too. The company hired McKinsey to develop a growth playbook for CNN. Trying to emulate Disney+, they decided to launch CNN+. But guess what? Anderson Cooper isn't Iron Man. Wolf Blitzer isn't Obi Wan Kenobi. The service was dead in a month. According to Nielsen, Warner Bros. Discovery drew 1.5% of viewing time in March. This was less than Disney, Amazon, Paramount, Roku, and Tubi. Netflix dominated, with 8% of total viewership. The lessons from the streaming world apply to every industry: the minute you stop asking what makes you special and start copying others, you've already lost. You have to be creative. You have to come up with your own playbook for growth. It's a mistake to think you can succeed by copying the strategies of successful competitors. Trying to win by benchmarking high-performing peers feels safe. It has persuasive appeal when presented in a PowerPoint deck. A huge industry of consultants has grown up around it, adding to the illusion of safety. And it's an easy way to win short-term praise from the business press and investors. In reality, though, benchmarking is a fast track to mediocrity. Copying others only tells you what worked yesterday for someone else, when what leaders need to focus on is what will work for them tomorrow. Great companies aren't built on copycat playbooks — they succeed by doing something original based on their unique strengths. Even while others were trying to copy it, Netflix stayed true to its own unique playbook based on global content, viewer data, and rapid iteration. When the company took out $2 billion in debt in 2018 to help finance a surge in original content, skeptics questioned whether its strategy was sustainable. But it wasn't a gamble — it was an investment based on data. Unlike traditional studios, Netflix knew exactly what its viewers were watching, where, for how long, and when they dropped off. It used those insights to launch hit shows like Bridgerton, Squid Game, and Stranger Things. Netflix also localized content early, producing Korean hits for South Korea and Indian dramas for South Asia and the Middle East. By the end of 2024, the skeptics had been silenced — Netflix's subscriber numbers topped 300 million, more than double the total at the end of 2018. Netflix operates on the premise that it will win by doing things its own way. For its part, Disney could have fallen into the trap of trying to chase Netflix when it launched its Disney+ streaming service in 2019. But rather than flooding the zone with content, Disney realized that its winning playbook depended on developing content around signature franchises like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar. These worlds are ultimately more than content — they're emotional ecosystems. And Disney knows how to turn emotions into revenue streams — through a flywheel of fan engagement, merchandise, theatrical releases, and theme park rides. For that reason, Disney doesn't define success solely through streaming metrics. It also pays close attention to loyalty, lifetime customer value, park attendance, and toy sales. Netflix and Disney+ succeeded by developing their own unique playbooks. HBO lost its way by trying to be something it wasn't. Influenced by consultants and consensus thinking, it was led into the sea of sameness, where companies go to die…or at least spend years treading water. To be sure, that doesn't mean you shouldn't watch and learn from competitors. But there's a big difference between stealing a page from someone else and trying to copy their whole playbook. The risk of doing that is threefold. First, it means you're playing to someone else's strengths, not your own. Second, it means you're focusing on what worked yesterday, not tomorrow. And third, you end up the same as everyone else, and sink into mediocrity. So if benchmarking isn't the answer, what is? The path to success lies in writing your own playbook, starting by answering five fundamental questions that define who you are and your vision for the future. HBO's latest reboot has been greeted with its fair share of sniggers and eye-rolls. But it shows that the company is waking up to what made it great in the first place. That's a good thing, giving it a shot at renewed success. The path forward for HBO isn't about going bigger or trying to please everyone. It's about going bolder, with fewer, better stories that shape the culture. In the end, the companies that come out on top aren't the ones chasing the crowd. They're the ones bold enough to say: This is who we are. This is what we believe. And this is how we win. No benchmarking required.
Screen Geek
14 hours ago
- Screen Geek
Report Claims How Much 'Superman' Must Make To Turn A Profit
The upcoming movie Superman has a lot of weight on its shoulders. In addition to having to make back its own budget and turn a profit for Warner Bros. Discovery, James Gunn's Superman has the honor of launching the DC Universe. Now a new report claims just how much Superman must make to turn a profit and boost the DCU going forward. The new live-action endeavor, which features actor David Corenswet as the titular superhero, also includes Rachel Brosnahan as Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult as Lex Luthor, Nathan Fillion as Guy Gardner, Isabela Merced as Hawkgirl, and Milly Alcock as Supergirl. As mentioned, the film will fully introduce the DC Universe as a live-action film franchise, one that will use these cast members and various others to carry their films and shows forward. Of course, the DCU's future also depends on the financial success of the film, which is said to have a $225 million budget according to The Wrap. The outlet additionally spoke to a talent agent who offered their insights regarding what the film must make in order to turn a profit. With the $225 million budget in mind, this agent suggests that James Gunn's Superman will have to make as much as $700 million worldwide in order to be called a success by the studio. 'While release dates are important, I don't think the challenge is ' Jurassic World: Rebirth ' or any other film,' they shared. 'The challenge is almost entirely a question of if Superman resonates with today's audience. Did they successfully update an Eisenhower-era character so the 2025 Gen Z audience can identify with him?' 'The simple brand recognition of Superman will probably take them to or close to $500 million worldwide, but anything above that will be because the audience identifies with the title character,' the insider added. Additionally, another source claims $500 million could be enough to turn a profit, but Warner Bros. Discovery is hoping to make much, much more in an effort to rejuvenate the studio. While there are several DC Universe projects in the pipeline regardless of how Superman performs at the box office, the franchise's future could still be much shorter-lived if Superman fails. As such, we'll have to see how Superman plays out when it hits theaters on July 11, 2025 and whether or not it makes a profit. Stay tuned to ScreenGeek for any additional updates regarding this highly-anticipated blockbuster as we have them.
