Wile E. Coyote is a famously loyal customer of Acme Corporation, producers of nitroglycerine, bird seed, giant rubber bands, explosive tennis balls, do-it-yourself tornado kits, and jet-propelled pogo sticks. His brand loyalty is absurd considering his actual experience of using Acme products to try to catch Road Runner: anything Acme-branded inevitably backfires. He’s the one who gets blown up by the explosive tennis balls. When he uses the tornado kit, he’s the one who gets sucked up into a twister. The jet-propelled pogo stick launches him backwards off a cliff. 

In Coyote vs. Acme, Wile E. Coyote decides to sue Acme with the help of a down-and-out human lawyer played by Will Forte. A live-action/animation hybrid in the tradition of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the film involved artists sketching line drawings of the animated characters over a rough edit which was then used as a reference for the animators and visual effects artists. It was a combination of 2D and 3D animation which captured the look and feel of the original Looney Tunes designs in a live-action world. 

Coyote vs. Acme “is about a giant corporation choosing stock over empathy, doing nothing ‘illegal’ but morally shady stuff for profit. It's a David vs Goliath story,” the film’s editor, Carsten Kurpanek, wrote on X. “It's about the cynical and casual cruelness of capitalism and corporate greed.”

In November 2023, Warner Bros. announced that they wouldn’t be releasing it. The crew were not informed in advance; instead they were blindsided after the decision had already been made. The film had been completed. Test audiences reportedly scored it very highly. But Warner Bros. decided that they would rather take a tax write-off of $30 million. 

Thirty million dollars. To shred a completed work of art. Once again, things blow up in Wile E. Coyote’s face. 

A year earlier, Warner had scrapped another film that was either completed or very near completion: Batgirl. The cancellation of Batgirl was shocking—basically unprecedented for a major Hollywood production—but it occurred in the context of Warner and Discovery merging to form Warner Bros. Discovery, under the leadership of new CEO David Zaslav. This made it relatively easy to rationalize Batgirl as a casualty of strategy shake-ups post-merger. “Several sources note that Batgirl was made under a different regime at Warner Bros., headed by Jason Kilar and Ann Sarnoff, that was singularly focused on building its streaming service, HBO Max,” Variety reports. Zaslav, in contrast, wants to concentrate on theatrical releases, and according to Variety, “Spending the money to expand the scope of Batgirl for theaters … was a non-starter at a company newly focused on belt-tightening and the bottom line.” Paul Tassi in Forbes also notes that “there were rumblings that the movie also just isn’t very good at baseline, and that WB wants to move in new directions with DC … for better or worse.” 

But none of that applies to Coyote vs. Acme. The merger has done its shaking up already. The film is, by the accounts of those lucky enough to see it, excellent. It does not have the potential to harm the future direction of the Looney Tunes series—at least, not any more than Space Jam: A New Legacy did. The story around Batgirl framed it as essentially unreleasable, undercutting any prospective mourning for its loss. But when it came to Coyote vs. Acme, that never stuck. “When I first heard that our movie was getting ‘deleted,’ I hadn’t seen it yet. So I was thinking what everyone else must have been thinking: this thing must be a hunk of junk,” Will Forte wrote in a letter to the cast and crew in February. “But then I saw it. And it’s incredible.”

Wile E. Coyote and Will Forte in “Coyote vs. Acme”

But like Batgirl, and like Scoob! Holiday Haunt, Coyote vs. Acme wasn’t released in theaters or on streaming or sold to another distributor. Like with Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, the studio determined that the promise of a tax write-off made the film worth more dead than alive. 

Something has gone very wrong in the movie business. There are blips, like the Barbenheimer phenomenon, that make me think everything will right itself again, but I know in my heart that the problems are too big, too systemic, for any one movie—or any one double bill—to fix. (Even if I’ll demand that Glen Powell shoulder that responsibility anyway.) I know the entire history of cinema is full of doomsaying about the death of movies—damn you, synchronized sound!—but it seems more and more like we took a wrong turn 30 years ago, and I don’t know how we’ll find our way back. Outside of award season, the release slates of the major Hollywood studios are dominated by narrower and narrower types of films: where are the romcoms, the weepies, the westerns? Where are films in that most basic of genres, drama? Maybe on limited release in a major city. 

“I think the movie business made a critical mistake … to think of it as, ‘this film did not make a ton of money, thus, we don’t make that film. This film will make a ton of money, thus we make that one.’ A very strict balance sheet equation,” director James Gray said in an interview. “[W]hen you make movies that only make a ton of money and they’re only one kind of movie, you begin to get a large segment of the population out of the habit of going to the movies. And then you begin to eliminate the importance of movies culturally.” 

The studios are, generally, less interested in being producers and distributors of original films—of maintaining the cultural importance of movies—than hoarding and exploiting existing intellectual property, pumping out sequels, spin-offs, and reboots for a couple of hundred million dollars a pop. Writing about Marvel movies and other franchise films, Martin Scorsese put it like this:

The pictures are made to satisfy a specific set of demands, and they are designed as variations on a finite number of themes. They are sequels in name but they are remakes in spirit, and everything in them is officially sanctioned because it can’t really be any other way. That’s the nature of modern film franchises: market-researched, audience-tested, vetted, modified, revetted and remodified until they’re ready for consumption. […] In many places around this country and around the world, franchise films are now your primary choice if you want to see something on the big screen.

Studios will try to convince you that it’s always been this way, but that’s not true. The highest grossing film of 1990 was Ghost, a romance about the spirit of a murder victim communicating with his girlfriend. The highest grossing film of 1988 was Rain Man, a drama about a hustler going on a road trip with his autistic brother. The year before, it was Fatal Attraction, the iconic erotic thriller. This isn’t all that long ago—but it’s hard to imagine any of those films being commercial hits now, let alone world-conquering box office behemoths. Popular cinema used to have that kind of scope. Now what is considered popular cinema has narrowed so much that Austin Butler got called pretentious for calling The Good, The Bad and The Ugly his favorite movie when he was a kid. 

That narrowness has been cultivated by an industry that would rather make a billion dollars on a mega-blockbuster that acts as an extended trailer for its own sequel than spread that budget across a couple of smaller movies that might be riskier bets. “If people are given only one kind of thing and endlessly sold only one kind of thing,” Scorsese goes on, “of course they’re going to want more of that one kind of thing.”

What’s strange, then, is that Coyote vs. Acme and Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt were killed when they were exactly the types of movies that you would expect the studios to release: animation and actioners, based on some of the best-known intellectual properties on earth. But if you zoom out, what happened is a natural reflection of the values that got us into this situation in the first place: a hostility to art, to entertainment, borne of an effort to engineer a movie business in which there is no risk. First by eliminating the risk of the filmmaker as artist, and ultimately, by eliminating the risk of releasing a product at all. 

The decision to shelve Coyote vs. Acme is one that makes sense on a balance sheet. And since the 1980s, film studios function more and more as just another line on a global conglomerate’s balance sheet. In 1989, Sony bought Columbia Pictures. In 1985, News Corp bought 20th Century Fox, which was then swallowed by Disney in 2019. Time Inc. and Warner Bros. merged in 1990, forming TimeWarner, which was acquired by AT&T in 2018 before being spun off from AT&T and merging with Discovery in 2022. Universal Pictures is owned by NBCUniversal, which is owned by Comcast. Paramount Pictures is owned by Paramount Global, created through the 2019 Viacom/CBS merger, and soon to be acquired by Skydance Media. 

And so the major studios are no longer companies that exist to make movies. They’re a comparatively small part of a global corporation. This means that executives who make key decisions about the movie business may have little interest in movies but instead can be transferred to and from radically different industries that the conglomerate has its fingers in. “You’ve got people who don’t know movies and don’t watch movies for pleasure deciding what movie you’re going to be allowed to make,” director Steven Soderbergh said in 2013. According to The Wrap a decade later, David Zaslav never watched Coyote vs. Acme before deciding not to release it. 

In the age of financialization, share price is king, even above profit: some of the biggest tech companies in the world have never turned a profit, but it doesn’t matter if the line keeps going up on the NASDAQ. Conglomerates and private equity groups buy up outlets like Pitchfork or Vice or The AV Club not because they value them or their work, but because they are easily stripped for parts. (The AV Club has seemingly been rescued in 2024 from its sad fate posting AI-written articles thanks to Paste Media. No such luck for Pitchfork or Vice.) The product doesn’t matter. 

And so tax write-offs for finished products make a perverse kind of sense. What should be a last resort when you’re stuck with an unusable, unreleasable product has become a kind of free money glitch. Jenny Nicholson, in her video essay about Disneyland’s Star Wars hotel, surmises that Disney shut the hotel so abruptly—announcing a closure date when later dates were already available for booking—because “the fiscal year ended on September 30th, and Disney's plan was to write the entire hotel off as a loss. The loss of the hotel would bring in a $300 million tax break.” Risk: eliminated.

Four years ago, I wrote in this magazine about how capitalism disincentivizes art preservation. But now, it’s incentivizing destruction. 

Because of backlash to their decision to shelve Coyote vs. Acme, Warner Bros. did an about-face and allowed the filmmakers to shop the film around to other distributors. According to The Wrap, Coyote vs. Acme was screened for Netflix, Amazon, and Paramount, who each “submitted handsome offers,” with Paramount proposing “a theatrical release component to their acquisition of Coyote vs. Acme.” But since Warner Bros. “stood to make $35 - $40 million on the tax write-down,” they wanted around $80 million for a sale—and, inside sources told The Wrap, “they wouldn’t allow the interested studios to counter Warner Bros.’ offer. It was a ‘take it or leave it’ situation, one that the other studios didn’t even know they were entering into.” 

These problems are, like I said, too big for even Barbenheimer to solve. But that doesn’t make them unsolvable. We need to maintain solidarity with film workers’ unions. We need to support public funding of the arts. We need to resist the industry’s attempts to narrow our scope of vision and to refine our taste. We need to support different kinds of films. But more than anything, we need antitrust. 

In the 1948 case United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the major Hollywood studios would have to divest from theater chains, no longer practice block booking—where the theater would have to buy a studio’s entire slate for exhibition blind, or not be allowed to buy any of the films individually—and no longer discriminate against smaller, independent theaters. This decision changed the course of film history. The number of independent movie theaters in America increased throughout the 1950s to the 1970s. So did the number of independent film studios, which, thanks to the major studios’ divestment, were actually able to get their films distributed on the big screen. Their rise was one of the ways the decision helped to dismantle the Hays Code, the censorship code abided to by the major studios. The end of long-term contracts for stars and directors meant that actors and filmmakers gained more artistic freedom. 

In 1985, Ronald Reagan’s Department of Justice declared it would no longer enforce the Paramount Decrees. We are still seeing the sprawling consequences of that (practical if not official) deregulation. And yet, in 2019, Donald Trump’s DOJ sought to terminate the decrees, a motion that the court granted in 2020. 

What we need is a modern version of the Paramount Decision: we need a Department of Justice that will go after the monopolistic practices of the media conglomerates, from intellectual property hoarding to, as in Coyote vs. Acme’s case, preventing cancelled projects from being sold to other distributors. There isn’t—or shouldn’t be—anything radical in that. For most of the 20th century, that would have been a goal so bipartisan as to border on the banal. But since Reagan, the standard for trust-busting moved away from whether there was sufficient competition in a given market and towards requiring proof that any given merger would harm consumers, which is a much higher burden of proof. But consolidation in the media space has harmed consumers. It’s just been done in a way that is hard to see without a control alongside it—something that’s hard to have when the industry is simultaneously making older films harder to access. 

If the media conglomerates were broken up, it would make spending $250 million on a blockbuster untenable, essentially forcing them to make a higher number of smaller, varied films—some of which might hit, some of which might flop—instead of putting all their money on an alleged safe bet. Broken up, the companies’ lobbying power would be diluted, and so maybe Congress would pass commonsense copyright reform. If the studios were limited in what existing intellectual properties they could own or acquire, it would force them to make more movies based on original ideas. There would still be superheroes movies—maybe even ones that aren’t based on the same existing characters over and over—but there’d be comedies and thrillers and teen movies that don’t have a superhero in them, too. 

So many of the films that are nostalgia-bait hits today are riding on the creative risks taken decades ago. Disney is more interested in saturating the world with Star Wars content than it ever could be in producing an original space fantasy by this generation’s George Lucas, wherever she may be hiding. We are constantly told that capitalism encourages innovation, but when I look at Hollywood, the opposite seems true: doing anything innovative, taking any chances, would spook the markets. The major studios are so scared of risk that they’re not willing to release Coyote vs. Acme. And they get paid handsomely for cowering in fear.