GoKawiilis a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
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How it started
Under David Zaslav’s leadership, WBD got very into the practice of shelving its own nearly completed projects in order to cash in on subsequent tax write-offs. To help deal with its looming debt and operating costs, the studio killed Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah’s live-action Batgirl feature and the Scoob! Holiday Haunt movie from Michael Kurinsky and Bill Haller. Though people weren’t exactly foaming at the mouth for a Christmas-themed Scooby-Doo prequel, Batgirl’s cancellation came as a surprise given how much the movie cost to produce (reportedly $90 million) and the fact that it was intended to be part of Warner Bros.’ last interconnected universe of movies based on DC’s comics. The DCEU was already plagued with problems long before the Batgirl situation, but it was still wild to see a studio chucking its movies into the garbage in order to make some guaranteed cash.
Like Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Coyote v. Acme was nearly finished when WBD first announced in 2023 that it had decided to put the film on ice. But by then, the public had become more aware of Zaslav’s — who said axing Batgirl took “courage” — willingness to throw his creative partners under the bus. As potential audience goers began lamenting the news online, filmmakers started instructing their representatives to cancel meetings with the studio for fear that their work, too, might be tossed into wood chipper. But rather than just chalking all of this up to be The Way Things Are Now™, people — who had already watched as HBO jettisoned Sesame Street and Westworld — saw this situation as being emblematic of the way that Zaslav has turned WBD into a company that prioritizes profits over the creation of art.
The initial backlash to Cotoye v. Acme being shelved was clearly getting to WBD by November of 2023 when the studio began offering other production houses like Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount (more on this in a bit) the chance to buy the movie’s distribution rights. For some reason, WBD turned down multiple proposals from parties who were interested in releasing Coyote v. Acme under their own brands. For a while, it seemed like WBD might have just been putting the movie up for sale without having any real intention of agreeing to a solid deal. But in 2025, Ketchup Entertainment — the same studio that bought the rights to WBD’s The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie in 2024 — swooped in with a successful bid to put Wile E. Coyote’s latest adventure on the big screen.
How it’s going
Meanwhile, WBD’s shareholders have voted to approve Paramount Skydance’s $110 billion acquisition offer, and while Zaslav isn’t completely guaranteed to walk away with a hefty chunk of change, it’s very possible that he’ll be exiting the company with a sizable golden parachute. The timing of it all makes it seem like no amount of cancelled projects could have kept WBD from needing to seek out a buyer for itself, and Coyote v. Acme highlights all of the good will that Zavlav and his colleagues chose to pass up.
What happens next
The next chapter of this story is where things are going to get very interesting because it will send signals to the larger entertainment industry about what kind of studio head Zaslav was and how much stock to put in movie outrage. It is somewhat difficult to get a sense of how much people’s excitement about Coyote v. Acme is about the movie itself as opposed to their disdain for Zaslav. Especially if it means thumbing your nose at an overpaid executive, it’s easy to say that you’re hyped to see the Wile E. and Bugs Bunny back in theaters. But none of WBD’s last three Looney Tunes features — Looney Tunes: Back in Action, Space Jam: A New Legacy, The Day The Earth Blew Up — were box office hits, and one has to wonder whether the same would be true for Coyote v. Acme if the studio had just released the movie itself.
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