The Looney Tunes movie that Warner Bros. once wrote off for a tax break is now chasing an Oscar. Coyote vs. Acme has been submitted for Best Animated Feature at the 99th Academy Awards, and reports on Tuesday, October 27 said the Academy had cleared it to compete in the category.
That is a big turn for a film that, in August, looked unlikely to be entered at all. A source close to the production had suggested then that Ketchup Entertainment might skip the race, because the hybrid of live-action actors and animated characters could fall short of the Academy’s animation rules. That position later softened to “pending further review.”
The 75 percent rule, by the numbers
The Academy defines an animated feature as a film longer than 40 minutes in which a significant number of the major characters are animated and animation fills no less than 75 percent of the running time.
Coyote vs. Acme runs 103 minutes. Three-quarters of that is 77.25 minutes (103 x 0.75), so at least 77 minutes of the film must include animation for it to qualify. With Will Forte, John Cena and Lana Condor playing flesh-and-blood lawyers in a real Albuquerque courtroom, that bar was never a formality, even though Wile E. Coyote, Bugs Bunny and the rest of the cartoon cast run through nearly every scene.
There is a precedent. In 2022, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On mixed stop-motion with live-action footage, and director Dean Fleischer Camp said he and A24 had to submit documentation proving the film had enough animation. The Academy accepted it, and it went on to earn a nomination. Coyote vs. Acme would be only the second live-action and animation hybrid nominated in the category’s 25-year history.
From write-off to awards campaign
The road here has been strange even by Hollywood standards:
- November 9, 2023: Warner Bros. Discovery says the finished film will not be released, preferring a tax loss of about $30 million.
- November 13, 2023: after a backlash from filmmakers and fans, the studio lets the team shop the film elsewhere.
- March 31, 2025: Ketchup Entertainment completes a purchase of the rights for roughly $50 million.
- August 28, 2026: the film opens in US theaters to $15.9 million.
- October 2026: worldwide box office passes $126 million, against a budget of $70 million to $72 million.
- October 27, 2026: the Best Animated Feature submission becomes public.
The end credits carry a dedication to everyone who “posted, shared, held up signs and spoke out when it counted.” Few campaigns have a cleaner underdog story to sell to voters.
Who it is up against
Until this week, the category looked like a duel between Laika’s stop-motion fantasy Wildwood and Pixar’s Toy Story 5. Other contenders include Disney’s Hoppers, Brad Bird’s Ray Gunn, Iron Boy, Tangles and Forgotten Island.
Each front-runner carries its own storyline. Laika has six nominations in the category without a single win. Pixar already owns 11 wins, including two for Toy Story films. Last year’s prize went to KPop Demon Hunters, part of a run of four straight winners from outside Disney and Pixar.
Coyote vs. Acme brings something neither rival has: crowd-pleasing numbers to match its reviews. Reviews were 96 percent positive across 299 critics on the leading review aggregator, and opening-weekend audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an “A”. A nomination would also be a first for Looney Tunes, since neither Looney Tunes: Back in Action nor The Day the Earth Blew Up was nominated.
The counter-argument is obvious. Some awards watchers already question whether a film where human stars argue a case in a real courtroom should count as animation at all, the same debate that would once have surrounded Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The Academy’s rule answers it in minutes, not feelings.
The film is already streaming on digital storefronts, which went live on September 29, and the 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray and DVD release follows on December 1. More on the rules and past winners of the category and on the film’s long road to release is online.
Further reading
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.
