The Indicator from Planet Money - Coyote vs. Acme finally gets its big break

Episode Date: August 27, 2026

Coyote vs. Acme will finally get its theatrical release on Friday after a years-long saga involving supposed tax write-downs, negotiations and multibillion-dollar studio deals. It's a drama almost straight out of a Hollywood screenplay. Today we have the story from the inside. This episode is an update of an episode from December 2023.Fact checking by Sierra Juarez.Your Next Listen — Why Paramount went looney tunes for Warner Bros.Connect with The Indicator — Sign up for The Indicator’s weekly newsletter! — Buy the Planet Money book — Find our socials, YouTube and more! — For sponsor-free episodes, subscribe to NPR+ Support public media with NPR+ and enjoy perks for over 25 podcasts like this one. This show’s perks include sponsor-free listening. Learn more at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

NPR. Sammy Birch is a screenwriter in Hollywood. Back in 2020, she was in the running to work on the Warner Brothers movie Coyote versus Acme. There were a lot of meetings with studio executives. The last one I remember, almost like Ned Beatty and Network. I mean, that kind of long, I'm sure it wasn't like that, but just like a long table of people staring at me. She got hired in February and went to the Warner Brothers lot to meet with the director, Dave Green, and producer Christopheria. The three of them got out this big poster board and threw up note cards with script ideas written on them.

Dave and I and Chris were just beginning the bones of like an outline and the tone and there were like hundreds of note cards that we put on the wall. That outline became a script. Actors got attached big names like S&L's Will Forte, W.W.E's John Sina and TATB's BILB's Lana Condor. Oh, that stands for it to all the boys I've loved before for those who don't know. L.J. and Peter Kavanaugh-Kovinsky forever. I love them. Anyway, the Coyote v. Acme movie wrapped in 2022, and they arranged a release date for 2023.

Meanwhile, another movie Sammy had written had become a critical hit called May December. She was preparing for a big premiere, trying on dresses with a stylist, when her manager called her to tell her that Coyote v. Acme had been axed. Like, I came out dazed, you know. Were you literally wearing like a galo dress?

Yeah, and it was so surreal. You know, it was like the tailor was like, oh, I'm so sorry. The word her manager actually used was destroyed. It wouldn't be quite that drastic in the end, but Coyote v. Acme would go through an odyssey-esque journey to the brink of destruction and back. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Sam Yolahorse Kessler.

And I'm Waylon Wong. After three years in cinematic limbo, Coyote v. Acme finally comes out on Friday. Today on the show, we have an update on our episode from 2023. We hear from the team behind the film who tell us what coyote's latest misadventure says about the weird world of Hollywood economics. Plus how coyote fell and rose again. Hollywood producer Chris DeFaria first got into show business as a kid. I was a voice of peppermint Patty in the Peanuts TV shows.

I cannot believe Chris featured so prominently in my childhood. I'm still getting over it. Years later, Chris went on to produce big budget movies like Gravity and Mad Max Fury Road, but he's always had a soft spot for animation. I often say that, look, you know, live action movies are seeking, often an objective truth. Animation really is pursuing an emotional truth. Chris saw movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which blended live action and animation, as an inspiration.

He went on to become one of the founders of Warner Brothers' current animation division, And around seven years ago, when Warner Brothers first floated the idea of a Wiley Coyote movie, Chris was really excited to get on board. The movie was based off of a New Yorker humor piece where Coyote sues the Acme Company. This is a company that supplies Coyote with the equipment for its failed schemes to get the roadrunner. In the movie, Coyote's lawyer is a personal injury attorney who says Acme's faulty products have harmed his client. And as the producer of Coyote v. Acme, Chris's job was to line up all the talent, hire a writer, for the script, an artist to make the storyboards. And part of that plan is thinking through the budget and expected box office.

The economics of the movie business are curious. The studios definitely green light a movie, and particularly approve the budget of the movie, based on their best projections about what it will make. Also, it's a really important component of this process. And that's the gut and the willingness to take risk. And the willingness to say, I think we're going to take a bet here because you never know. you might have magic in a bottle. In 2021, things were not feeling quite so magical at Warner.

It had announced a merger with discovery to become Warner Brothers Discovery. And David Zazlov, the CEO of the new media conglomerate, was inheriting a studio laden with debt. He also inherited the films in progress at Warner Brothers. Now, typically, new studio heads will try and make the best of the movies that are already in the works when they take over. The new administration will shun or not give the, absolute amount of umph to a particular release.

But the film will still come out. That is Anthony Delisandro. He is a writer and editor at Deadline, a trade publication covering Hollywood. When Zadzlov came into power, he did release a lot of previously greenlit films, like The Flash, and the colossal hit Barbie.

So it has been an anomaly that we see movies being killed. First, it was a new Backgirl movie. Then it was a Scooby-Doo movie called Scoob Holiday Haunt. These movies had finished filming, but still had some post-production left to do. Anthony says the studio is stemming its losses by putting the movies in a vault and writing them down on its taxes. There's some industry debate about this take, but basically it goes that the studio can count the movies as a loss, since it didn't make any money on them. And then the company can get back a fraction of the millions of dollars it already spent.

Now, to be clear, this move doesn't generate a net profit for the company, but the alternative would be spending even more money on marketing and distribution. Marketing in particular is a huge expense for a movie that can rival or even exceed the movie's production cost. For instance, Barbie costs $145 million to produce and $150 million to market. Chris says he was told there was a financial reason that Coyote v. Acme was axed back in 2023, but he doesn't know how much money was involved in the decision. Like he said before, the economics and movie making are curious. It's part spreadsheets, part guts.

Chris saw what happened to Bat Girl and Scoop Holiday Haunt, but Coyote v. Acme was further along than those films. In my history of working in Hollywood, I'd never seen a movie that was shelved this way. That was what Chris thought. Until today. Whoa, Waylon, listeners can't see this, but now you're wearing a shiny silver jumpsuit and cool futuristic visors?

And Sam, you've got to be a lot of. Don't talk to me about AIT shirt and you're chugging a protein peptide shake. We must be in 2026. Yeah, and for the past few years, Warner Brothers has been going through an identity crisis, too. Same, same. First, Warner Brothers Discovery announced it was going to split its cable networks from the rest of the studio. Then Paramount Skydance, led by the Trump-aligned David Ellison, made an unsolicited bid to buy the whole studio.

Then Netflix put in its own bid, and then they backed out. Warner Brothers Discovery eventually accepted Paramount's counter bid, valued at around $110 billion, that merger is now being challenged in federal court by 12 states. Chris admits he was kind of viewing this all through a narrow lens. Like everything that ever happened in the world during that two-year period, I could only see things to the lens of our movie. So, like, of course, this entire merger is going to be, it must be something to do with our movie. Democracy might be at stake, let alone antitrust concerns.

Exactly. So while I'm sure they were worried about many things, things. We were only worried about our movie. Around this time, there were rumors that Coyote versus Acme might get picked up by this little upstart called Catchup Entertainment. Ketchup previously released of Michael Keaton Dramedy and a Hellboy sequel. That's two separate movies, not the same movie. This is their model. They swoop in after a movie is done and arrange for its wide release. And Chris says he might have greased the wheels a little bit. The rumor of ketchup showing interest landed on my lap, and I wasn't shy about sharing that with everybody. In March of

In 2020, Ketchup did end up purchasing the film to the tune of $50 million and agreed to release it to theaters. Chris found out while getting coffee in his car. And then that was that. And then I continued my drive. And I just kept thinking, is this even possible? Oh, my God, I can't believe the journey this has been on is coming to an end. And it might work out. Trying to piece together what happened to Coyote v. Acme, the best explanation Chris can come up with is that it might have just been too odd of a movie to know how to market.

And writer Sammy Burch agrees. She says this whole saga showed her how risk-averse Hollywood can be, but it doesn't have to be. I was really moved when Cora Jefferson, when he won his Oscar for American Fiction, took the time to talk about, you know, instead of making a $100 million movie, can you make $10 million movies? I think that's actually a really great idea. Sammy recently found some of those index cards that she and Chris wrote when Coyote v. Acme was just a twinkle in their eyes.

She took a photo of what they said and sent it to Chris. She sent them along and they were hope, surprise, and emotion. And the movie delivered all these three things in a really great way. And so did the journey we all went on. Hope, surprise, emotion, and maybe just a little bit of good old-fashioned TNT. That's all, folks. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with Engineering by Kwayze Lee, as fact-checked by Sierra Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie.

Kaking Cannon is our show's editor and The Indicator is a production. of Acme. Oh, NPR.