The saga of Warner Bros.’ abandoned, bedraggled, “left for tax write-off” animated/live-action hybrid feature, Coyote Vs. Acme, continues apace this week—because, just like its title character, you apparently can’t keep this movie down.
This is per Deadline, which reports that the film—which co-stars John Cena as the head of the Acme Corporation, which becomes entangled in a legal (and also probably TNT-based) battle with the Looney Tunes star after years of the company’s products blowing seven kinds of shit out of him—is currently being shopped around to other studios, and at least a few have offered up token bids.
According to Puck, that includes Netflix, which apparently tried to pick up the movie on the cheap—since, well, Warner Bros. was already looking to make back les than the movie’s $70 million budget when it slated the film for tax write-off status. The studio supposedly didn’t bite, though, opening up the possibility of Paramount maybe buying the movie instead—and maybe even giving it a theatrical release, wonder of wonders.
This is all fascinating to us, for a couple of reasons—including the fact that “Wile E. Coyote teams up with a loser lawyer played by Will Forte to fight John Cena” has sounded like a fun premise ever since this thing was first announced. But it’s also very weird to have a studio holding on to a fully completed movie like this that it’d rather junk for a quick payday than release, and then finding itself pressured into shopping the movie around to its various competitors. (At least in part because the studio’s willingness to toss out completed work like Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt has left a bad taste in creatives’ mouths for the last year or so.) It’s all made weirder by the fact that lots of industry types in Hollywood have now, in fact, seen a completed version of Coyote Vs. Acme, with most reports suggesting that the movie is pretty fun. So it just becomes a question of a) does that actually matter, and b), who’s going to pony up and pay to put the movie in front of folks?