Coyote vs. Acme finally gets its big break

0:01NPR.

0:05Sammy Birch is a screenwriter in Hollywood. Back in 2020, she was in the running to work on the Warner Brothers movie Coyote vs. Acme. There were a lot of meetings with studio executives. The last one I remember, almost like Ned Beatty in Network. I mean, that kind of long, I'm sure it wasn't like that, but just like a long table of people staring at me. She got hired in February and went to the Warner Brothers lot to meet with the director, Dave Green, and producer Chris Stefaria. The three of them got out this big poster board and threw up note cards with script ideas written on them. Dave and I and Chris were just beginning the bones of like an outline and the tone.

0:43And there were like hundreds of note cards that we put on the wall. That outline became a script. Actors got attached big names like SNL's Will Forte, WWE's John Cena, and T.A.T. B.I.L.B.'s Lana Condor. Oh, that stands for To All the Boys I've Loved Before, for those who don't know. LJ and Peter Kavinsky forever. Ugh, I love them. Anyway, the Coyote vs. Acme movie wrapped in 2022, and they arranged a release date for 2023. Meanwhile, another movie Sammy had written had become a critical hit called May-December. She was preparing for a big premiere, trying on dresses with a stylist, when her manager called her to tell her that Coyote vs.

1:24Acme had been axed. Like, I came out dazed, you know. Were you literally wearing like a gala dress? Like a gown, yeah. Wow. And it was so surreal. You know, it was like the tailor was like, oh, I'm so sorry. The word her manager actually used was destroyed. It wouldn't be quite that drastic in the end, but Coyote vs. Acme would go through an Odyssey-esque journey to the brink of destruction and back. This is The Indicator from Planet Money. I'm Samuel Ahors Kessler. And I'm Waylon Wong. After three years in cinematic limbo, Coyote vs. Acme finally comes out on Friday. Today on the show, we have an update on our episode from 2023.

2:04We hear from the team behind the film who tell us what Coyote's latest misadventure says about the weird world of Hollywood economics. Plus, how Coyote fell and rose again.

2:34at schwab.com slash financial decoder. This message comes from Dell Technologies. Interruptions happen at work, but with the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra with vPro, built with optimized battery and built-in intelligence, your tech won't slow you down. Dell.com slash Dell-Pro. Built for you. This message comes from HomeServe. A burst pipe. A dead water heater. The AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs. With plans covering stuff basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started.

3:16Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50 % less your first year. Savings compared to renewal price void in Florida. Hollywood producer Chris DeFaria first got into show business as a kid. I was the voice of Peppermint Patty. in the Peanuts TV shows. I cannot believe Chris featured so prominently in my childhood. I'm still getting over it. Years later, Chris went on to produce big-budget movies like Gravity and Mad Max Fury Road, but he's always had a soft spot for animation. I often say that, look, you know, live-action movies are seeking often an objective truth.

3:55Animation really is pursuing an emotional truth. Chris saw movies like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which blended live-action and animation, as an inspiration. He went on to become one of the founders of Warner Brothers' current animation division. And around seven years ago, when Warner Brothers first floated the idea of a Wile E. Coyote movie, Chris was really excited to get on board. The movie was based off of a New Yorker humor piece where Coyote sues the Acme Company. This is a company that supplies Coyote with the equipment for its failed schemes to get the Roadrunner. In the movie, Coyote's lawyer is a personal injury attorney who says Acme's faulty products have harmed his client.

4:32And as the producer of Coyote vs. Acme, Chris's job was to line up all the talent, hire a writer for the script, an artist to make the storyboards. And part of that plan is thinking through the budget and expected box office. The economics of the movie business are curious. The studios definitely greenlight a movie, particularly approve the budget of the movie, based on their best projections about what it will make. Also, it's a really important component of this process. And that's the gut and the willingness to take risk and the willingness to say, I think we're going to take a bet here because you never know, you might have magic in a bottle.

5:08In 2021, things were not feeling quite so magical at Warner. It had announced a merger with Discovery to become Warner Brothers Discovery. And David Zaslav, the CEO of the new media conglomerate, was inheriting a studio laden with debt. He also inherited the films in progress at Warner Brothers. Now, typically, new studio heads will try and make the best of the movies that are already in the works when they take over. The new administration will shun or not give the absolute amount of oomph to a particular release. But the film will still come out. That is Anthony D 'Alessandro. He is a writer and editor at Deadline, a trade publication covering Hollywood.

5:48When Zaslav came into power, he did release a lot of previously greenlit films, like The Flash and the colossal hit Barbie. So it has been an anomaly that we see movies being killed. First, it was a new Batgirl movie. Then it was a Scooby-Doo movie called Scoob Holiday Haunt. These movies had finished filming, but still had some post-production left to do. Anthony says the studio is stemming its losses by putting the movies in a vault and writing them down on its taxes. There's some industry debate about this take, but basically it goes that the studio can count the movies as a loss since it didn't make any money on them.

6:26And then the company can get back a fraction of the millions of dollars it already spent. Now, to be clear, this move doesn't generate a net profit for the company, but the alternative would be spending even more money on marketing and distribution. Marketing, in particular, is a huge expense for a movie that can rival or even exceed the movie's production cost. For instance, Barbie cost$145 million to produce and$150 million to market. Chris says he was told there was a financial reason that Coyote vs. Acme was axed back in 2023, but he doesn't know how much money was involved in the decision.

7:00Like he said before, the economics of moviemaking are curious. It's part spreadsheets, part cuts. Chris saw what happened to Batgirl and Scoob Holiday Haunt, but Coyote vs. Acme was further along than those films. In my history of working in Hollywood, I'd never seen a movie that was shelved this way. That was what Chris thought. Until today. Whoa, Waylon, listeners can't see this, but now you're wearing a shiny silver jumpsuit and cool futuristic visors? And Sam, you've got a Don't Talk to Me About AI t-shirt and you're chugging a protein peptide shake. We must be in 2026! Yeah, and for the past few years, Warner Brothers has been going through an identity crisis, too.

7:44Same, same. First, Warner Brothers Discovery announced it was going to split its cable networks from the rest of the studio. Then Paramount Skydance, led by the Trump-aligned David Ellison, made an unsolicited bid to buy the whole studio. Then Netflix put in its own bid, and then they backed out. Warner Brothers Discovery eventually accepted Paramount's counterbid, valued at around$110 billion. That merger is now being challenged in federal court by 12 states. Chris admits he was kind of viewing this all through a narrow lens. Like everything that ever happened in the world during that two-year period, I could only see things through the lens of our movie.

8:19So, like, of course, this entire merger is going to be, it must be something to do with our movie. Democracy might be at stake, let alone antitrust concerns. So while I'm sure they were worried about many things, we were only worried about our movie. Around this time, there were rumors that Coyote vs. Acme might get picked up by this little upstart called Ketchup Entertainment. Ketchup previously released a Michael Keaton dramedy and a Hellboy sequel. That's two separate movies, not the same movie. This is their model. They swoop in after a movie is done and arrange for its wide release. And Chris says he might have greased the wheels a little bit.

8:53The rumor of Catch Up showing interest landed on my lap. And I wasn't shy about sharing that with everybody. In March of 2025, Catch Up did end up purchasing the film to the tune of$50 million and agreed to release it to theaters. Chris found out while getting coffee in his car. And then that was that. And I continued my drive. And I just kept thinking, is this even possible? Oh my God, I can't believe the journey this has been on is coming to an end. And it might work out. Trying to piece together what happened to Coyote vs. Acme, the best explanation Chris can come up with is that it might have just been too odd of a movie to know how to mark it.

9:32And writer Sammy Birch agrees. She says this whole saga showed her how risk-averse Hollywood can be. But it doesn't have to be. I was really moved when Cora Jefferson, when he won his Oscar for American fiction, took the time to talk about, you know, instead of making a$100 million movie, can you make 10$10 million movies? I think that's actually a really great idea. Sammy recently found some of those index cards that she and Chris wrote when Coyote vs. Acme was just a twinkle in their eyes. She took a photo of what they said and sent it to Chris. She sent them along and they were hope, surprise, and emotion.

10:10And the movie delivered all these three things in a really great way. And so did the journey we all went on. Hope, surprise, emotion, and maybe just a little bit of good old-fashioned TNT. That's all, folks. This episode was produced by Corey Bridges with engineering by Kweisi Lee. It's fact-checked by Sarah Juarez and edited by Julia Ritchie. Kate Kincanon is our show's editor, and The Indicator is a production of Acme. Oh, NPR. This message comes from NPR sponsor Charles Schwab. Financial decisions can be tricky. Your biases can lead you astray. Financial Decoder, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, can help.

10:49Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash financial decoder. This message comes from HomeServe. A burst pipe. A dead water heater. The AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs, with plans covering stuff basic homeowner's insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50 % less your first year. Savings compared to renewal price. Boyd in Florida.