EXCLUSIVE: Screenings are being set up this week for streamers Amazon Prime, Apple and Netflix to check out and potentially acquire Warner Bros‘ axed Looney Tunes movie Coyote Vs. Acme after the studio’s phone ran off the hook the entire weekend from angry filmmakers and talent reps over their third feature film kill after Batgirl and Scoob Holiday Haunt! The more egregious Hollywood sin here with Coyote vs. Acme is that it’s a finished film, that was intended for a theatrical release.

Of those kicking the tires, even though no deals have been drafted, I hear Amazon is a leading contender given the fact that its Courtenay Valenti, the Head of Film, Streaming and Theatrical for Amazon Studios and MGM, was a big champion and lynchpin for the movie while she was at Warner Bros. All of this boils down to Jen Salke’s sign-off I understand. During the pandemic Amazon Prime acquired Sony’s family titles Hotel Transylvania 4 and Cinderella among other movies. Amazon has been known to take finished films off the table with $100M and turn them into events for the streamer.

With the actors strike just ending and everyone–streamers and the theatrical schedule– in need of product, it seems foolish to have a studio like Warners live a branded asset like Coyote vs. Acme lying around and taking a $30M take write-off on the $70M production. With Amazon now in the theatrical game, it will be interesting to see if Warner Bros actually allows them to theatrically release Coyote vs. Acme since the Burbank, CA lot is too cheap to do so given their financial dire straits.

Amazon is also a great landing pad for Coyote vs. Acme as the studio has three upcoming movies with its star John Cena.

After Batgirl and Scoob! were dumped, a group of filmmakers with business at the studio started a text chain — a support group of sorts — to share their hopes and their anxieties, as well as encouragement and tips for navigating the studio. The one question all of them had: What was going on with their movies?

The Coyote cancelation roiled the creative community perhaps even harder than Batgirl and Scoob!, because those had been positioned as a one-off change in strategy, never to happen again. According to sources, after the Coyote vs. Acme news broke last week, several filmmakers instructed reps to cancel meetings they had on the books with Warners. But now that Coyote may ultimately find a new home, these filmmakers are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Unlike the other films Warners canceled, Coyote vs. Acme was fully completed and had tested multiple times in the 90s. (Best picture winner Argo, both Deadpool movies, and the first The Conjuring are among features that likewise tested in the 90s.) According to sources who have seen the film — which stars Will Forte, John Cena and Lana Condor — Coyote vs. Acme is a popcorn-style crowd-pleaser.

“Coyote vs. Acme is a great movie,” tweeted writer-director BenDavid Grabinski, who worked with Green on Happily. “The best of its kind since [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit … The leads are super likable. It’s beautifully shot. The animation is great. The ending makes everyone fucking cry. I thought the goal of this business was to make hit movies?”

After Batgirl was shelved, a narrative emerged that the film was axed because it wasn’t very good. “Our job is to protect the DC brand, and that’s what we’re going to do,” Warner Bros. Discovery CEO Zaslav declared during 2022 investor’s call days after the cancelation. Peter Safran, who became the head of DC Studios after Batgirl was shelved, said the team behind the film was talented, but that Batgirl “was not releasable” in remarks to press in January.

Green’s industry friends mobilized to prevent that kind of messaging from tainting the reputation of Coyote vs. Acme. There is still a planned “funeral screening” this week on the Warners lot, according to sources, though “funeral” is no longer an apt term for a project that may very well find new life.

“I don’t know how you see the movie and then go, ‘That couldn’t happen to me,’” says Brian Duffield, the filmmaker behind the sleeper Hulu hit No One Will Save You. Duffield was not involved in Coyote vs. Acme, but is friends with Green and gave notes on the film.

Part of Duffield’s frustration, he says, was that Green did everything that was asked of him: he delivered the film, which sources say cost $72 million, on budget. He hit the right test scores. He even moved away from his friends and family to London for 18 months to save the studio money on post-production costs. All this, only to see his film get run off a cliff.

Duffield believes that Coyote can make money — certainly more than the tax write-off.

“I think Coyote is really similar to Barbie in a lot of ways,” says Duffield. “They are playing with iconography in a really fun, popcorn kind of way.”

Veteran film executives acknowledge that shelving a film for a tax-writeoff — and to avoid distribution and marketing costs — can make an earnings quarter look better, but it can be short-sighted for a studio in the business of building franchises and a slate.

The decision followed the industry taking a hard turn from a streaming boom golden age that saw studios shelling out unprecedented billions on content, particularly titles related to a familiar IP like Coyote vs. Acme. Some saw Warners’ bottom-line ruthlessness as less of a new way of mistreating talent than a return to how Hollywood used to be.

“The idea that there was a little window there where a lot of people got to try a lot of stuff they wouldn’t have gotten to try in normal circumstances, that’s the anomaly,” one top writer-producer said. “The kind of red tooth and claw version of [conducting business], the nastiness — I think that’s the norm.”

Still, it’s easy to imagine that if an in-demand creative has an all-things-being-equal choice of going with Warners or another studio in the future, that Zaslav’s aggressive tax strategies could give real pause — even with the reversal. Zaslav previously reversed an unpopular decision — the gutting of TCM — after an outcry from creatives including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson.

Interestingly, the plot of Coyote vs. Acme follows the speechless, ever-determined Wile E. Coyote as he teams up with a lawyer (Forte) to fight the big ACME corporation. Just like in the cartoons, Coyote buys ACME devices to try and kill Road Runner, but they never work properly, and often abruptly explode. The third shelved Warners movie, in other words, is the story of an underdog taking on a heartless company whose executives don’t realize there can be real consequences to making their products blow up in your face.