In early February, strange news appeared about Warner Brothers Discovery’s plans for one of its films, a live-action-with-animation spin on Looney Tunes called “Coyote vs. Acme.” The studio did not plan to releas e the movie. It had tried to sell it to a third party — one industry report said Netflix, Amazon and Paramount were all interested — but no deal materialized. Audiences seemed unlikely to ever see the thing.
All this, industry watchers agreed, was not about cinematic merit. It was about accounting. Warner spent about $70 million making the film and might have gradually recouped that amount the usual way: by releasing the movie to paying audiences in theaters and on streaming platforms. But it might instead shelve the movie, interring it in a metaphorical graveyard and writing it off as a total, immediate loss, rather than absorbing that loss over quarters to come. One report estimated that this might net some $35 million to $40 million in tax savings, though a Warner spokesperson described that scenario as “inaccurate,” adding that no final decision has been made.
Studios have been doing this sort of arithmetic a lot lately. Over the last few years, Warner — which also owns channels like TNT and TBS and streaming platforms like Max — has whittled down its content-and-development holdings in an effort to reduce costs and chip away at its $45 billion gross debt. Near-complete movies have been mothballed, underperforming shows pulled from streaming libraries. Disney+, Hulu and Paramount+ have made similar decisions, roiling an already-baffling patchwork of streaming options. You can now watch an HBO property like “Westworld” on Amazon Prime Video but not through the network that made it in the first place.
The purgatory of “Coyote vs. Acme” galvanized audiences in an interesting way. Unlike other high-profile cancellations — say, the 2022 film “Batgirl,” axed during postproduction and called “not releasable” by the head of (the Warner-owned) DC Studios — “Coyote” was a completed film. It was also, by all accounts, good; Will Forte, one of its stars, called it “incredible.” This wasn’t the movie’s first funeral, either. News of its cancellation was first reported on Nov. 9 — followed, later that day, by an anonymous member of the movie’s production team posting a behind-the-scenes reel of the crew’s work on YouTube. The video was taken down after a copyright claim, but it had already revealed some of the ingenious mayhem that audiences would miss out on: squished cars, real clouds of dust kicked up by an animated roadrunner, charming prop renderings of the cartoons’ rocket skates and hand-painted signs. Say what you will about the artistic value of a film based on a cartoon, but this movie looked like fun.
The backlash to Warner’s reported decision might have helped prompt executives to try selling “Coyote” on the open market. A February report in The Wrap suggested that Warner rebuffed other studios after they failed to meet the asking price, said to be even higher than the studio’s own production cost. (The Warner spokesperson says no formal bid was made by any of the distributors who viewed the film for possible acquisition.) Another theory, floated to me by someone who worked on the movie, was that executives were concerned about embarrassment if “Coyote” turned out to be a hit for someone else. Either way, it felt as though the only parts of the film most people would see were promotional stills shared by Eric Bauza, the actor who voiced Wile E. Coyote. The movie was based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by the humorist Ian Frazier, which had Coyote filing a lawsuit over the indignities he had endured at the hands of Acme’s unreliable explosives and physics-defying spring shoes. In one image, Forte sits next to his cartoon client, who wears a familiar dopey expression as he endures this legal showdown with his mail-order tormentors.
You can picture the high jinks. In fact, a small army of designers, animators and demolition experts spent years imagining them. Those people want their work to be seen. A sizable audience wants to pay money to see it. Yet that mutuality isn’t enough. Millions of dollars and thousands of hours went into creating something that could simply vanish into accounting.
Art has always been commerce, and studios like Warner have long controlled the media we’re offered. For almost a century, they have scrapped projects and let ideas languish, mostly without our ever knowing much about it. We might complain today about pop culture governed by algorithms and data, but it’s not as though 20th-century decisions about which movies hit Blockbuster or which songs dominated the radio were based on some high-minded meritocracy; we have always been at the mercy of boardrooms.
What has changed is our awareness of how such things work. There was a time when only the subscribers of Hollywood trade magazines knew much about which movies were in development, to say nothing of which were canned. But audiences today are as intimately acquainted with upcoming projects as they are with the financial maneuvering behind them.
This isn’t just a matter of more of us reading entertainment news. Normal people have been forced to attend to this stuff — baroque tangles of licensing and distribution rights — just to be consumers. Feel like streaming a favorite sitcom? You’ll need to know which subscription matches that media and then keep up with whatever agreements, disputes or mergers will dictate its availability or shift it into another company’s library. Even ownership of media has become an intricate concept. You might “purchase” a movie from a platform like Amazon Prime Video or Apple TV+, but you’re still subject to the vagaries of the deal; things may simply disappear from your digital library because of expiring agreements.
The mechanics have been laid bare, and it is consumers who have been burdened with navigating them. It is particularly maddening that this visibility doesn’t translate to malleability: No matter how well you know the ecosystem, you remain under the thumb of corporate arrangements. One parent I know described a child’s panic when beloved songs or videos would vanish from wherever they previously accessed them. It is not easy to explain digital rights management and international licensing to a 5-year-old, and yet it’s precisely those complexities that might dictate whether or not they can watch “CoComelon” on vacation.
Normal people have been forced to attend to this stuff just to be consumers.
Consider too the barrage of marketing campaigns intended to monopolize our attention through every stage of a film’s development, from conception to release. Marvel Studios has its “phases” announcements, in which it outlines years of planned movies and shows in splashy events designed to keep fans in a frenzy about the long-term strategy of a major media company, as though a shareholder meeting has broken out at Comic-Con.
As much as a satirical legal filing written from the perspective of a cartoon coyote’s lawyer can speak to the moment, there’s a section toward the end of Frazier’s story that maps out a bit of the daffy labyrinth consumers now face. “As the Court is no doubt aware, Defendant has a virtual monopoly of manufacture and sale of goods required by Mr. Coyote’s work,” Frazier wrote. The coyote had “come to mistrust Defendant’s products” but had “no other domestic source of supply to which to turn.” This is one impact of media consolidation: Studios can work very hard to hold your attention before deciding, at the last possible moment, that they’re better off throwing out artists’ work than letting you pay money to see it. “Coyote vs. Acme,” the Warner spokesperson says, “remains available for acquisition.” Just not by you.