The film Warner Bros. wrote off for a tax break is now playing in Portugal (it is Coyote vs. Acme)
Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the finished film in November 2023 to claim it as a loss. Ketchup Entertainment bought the worldwide rights in March 2025, and NOS Audiovisuais put it in Portuguese cinemas on 27 August.
Films are usually late because of a director who cannot settle, or a shot that will not render. This one was late because of a spreadsheet.
Coyote vs. Acme was finished when Warner Bros. Discovery decided, in November 2023, not to release it at all and to book it as a tax write-off instead. The backlash was loud and came from inside the studio as well as outside it. Months of failed talks with other buyers followed, until Ketchup Entertainment picked up the worldwide rights in March 2025. It reached Portuguese cinemas on 27 August, distributed here by NOS Audiovisuais.
The coyote finally sues
The premise settles a seventy-year-old injustice, and it does it as a courtroom comedy. After decades of being launched off cliffs, flattened by boulders and betrayed by rockets that never worked as advertised, Wile E. Coyote takes the company that sold him all of it to court.
On his side is Kevin Avery, a personal injury lawyer played by Will Forte. Across the room is Buddy Crane, Acme’s corporate counsel, played by John Cena. Lana Condor rounds out the leads. Dave Green directs, and the film mixes live action with hand-drawn animation, which is the register the Road Runner cartoons always lived in, only now with a judge in it.
Why the story outlasted the joke
The case became shorthand for a wider argument about what happens to completed films when they are worth more as a deduction than as a release. A studio can write a film off and never show it to anyone. What Warner appears not to have priced in was the reputational cost of doing that to the Looney Tunes.
Nearly three years on, the ending is about as good as it could be. The film exists, it is in cinemas, and an independent distributor is the one carrying it there. The official trailer and the full synopsis are in the NOS Audiovisuais release.
It opened on the same Thursday as Ridley Scott’s new film, which leaves anyone heading to the cinema this weekend with an unusually strange choice: serious science fiction with real stars, or a coyote suing a supplier.
By Lucy Bennett
Image: still from the official trailer, NOS Audiovisuais / Ketchup Entertainment
