UPDATE 8/30: The numbers came in. Coyote vs. Acme opened to an estimated $15.4 million with an A CinemaScore, nearly five times Ketchup’s previous record.
UPDATE 8/28: The movie is in theaters. Coyote vs. Acme took in $1.7 million from Thursday previews, and director Dave Green marked the release by telling the fans who saved it, “We won.” Original article follows. Latest estimates are $12-$14M.
Coyote vs. Acme is now projected to open to around $15 million this weekend, per Deadline, and the number has been climbing all month.
Three weeks ago, the forecasts had the movie opening somewhere between $3 million and $8 million.
Deadline reports the movie has taken in $400,000 from sneak previews, that advance ticket sales are solid, and that the Ketchup Entertainment release has heat behind it, with one caveat: the trade says it doesn’t yet know whether that’s a false positive, because the support on social media may be concentrated in New York and Los Angeles rather than spread across the rest of the country.
The other forecasts are higher.
Box Office Pro has Coyote vs. Acme at $12 million to $18 million.
Global Box Office has it at $16 million to $22 million and notes that anywhere in that range would be the biggest opening in Ketchup’s history.
The Day the Earth Blew Up, the company’s previous Looney Tunes release, opened to $3.1 million in March 2025.
Deadline adds Spider-Man: Brand New Day holding No. 1 with $18 million in its fifth weekend, so the top of the Global Box Office range would put a movie Warner Bros. Discovery wrote off ahead of Spider-Man.
Also opening: Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars from 20th Century Studios, which Box Office Pro has at $18 million to $23 million, and the Sundance pickup Buddy from Roadside Attractions.
The Projection Rose on Presales, Not on Interest
Here is what changed in the last three weeks and what didn’t.
The Quorum, which polls everyday moviegoers on whether they’ve heard of a movie and whether they want to see it, has Coyote vs. Acme at 40 percent awareness and 43 percent interest as of August 25.
Interest was 43 percent on July 7, before most people had heard of the movie. It was 41 percent on August 4. Awareness went from 27 to 40 across that stretch. Interest gained two points.
The audience that wants to see Coyote vs. Acme is the same size it was in July.
What the sneaks and the presales are measuring is something the interest number can’t: how badly that audience wants it.
The group that has been sitting in the low 40s for seven weeks, loud enough online to keep the movie alive after WBD shelved it, is buying its tickets early.
That’s where the $400,000 in sneaks comes from, and that’s why the projection jumped from single digits to $15 million while the interest number sat still.
That’s also what Deadline’s false-positive worry is about.
If the heat is coming out of New York and Los Angeles, it’s coming out of the core, and the question is whether anyone outside the core shows up.
The tracking says that group hasn’t gotten any bigger, not on a 100 percent Rotten Tomatoes debut, not on the press cycle that followed it, not on the release date arriving.
Both things are true at once. The fans are converting. The audience isn’t growing.
$15 Million Is Where Ketchup’s $50 Million Comes Into Play
Ketchup bought Coyote vs. Acme from WBD for a reported $50 million, and Puck’s Kim Masters wrote this week that the company has an outside shot at earning that back domestically.
A $15 million opening is right where that becomes possible on paper.
A family movie that holds typically finishes at around three times its opening weekend, which puts $15 million at $45 million to $50 million domestic.
A fan-driven opening, where most of the audience shows up in the first two days, usually lands closer to two to two-and-a-half times, which puts the same $15 million at $30 million to $38 million.
The gap between those two numbers is the gap between Ketchup reaching the figure Puck laid out and falling well short of it, and it comes down entirely to the audience the tracking says isn’t there yet.
What to Watch This Weekend
The topline number won’t settle it. The shape of the weekend will.
- Friday’s share of the three-day. A fan-event opening puts 45 percent or more of the weekend into Friday, including Thursday previews. A family movie with walk-up business runs closer to 35 to 40 percent.
- Saturday against Friday. Family films go up on Saturday. Front-loaded films go down.
- The PostTrak breakdown. How much of the audience is parents with kids versus adults without them says whether the movie reached past the people who followed the write-off story.
- The theater count. Ketchup doesn’t have Warner Bros.’ reach, and the screen count sets the ceiling before a single ticket is sold.
- Whether No. 1 is in play. Brand New Day at $18 million in its fifth weekend is beatable if Global Box Office’s range is right.
One more thing to put on the record before the numbers come in: the second weekend is Labor Day, September 4 to 7, and a four-day holiday frame flatters every family movie’s hold. A strong second weekend has to be read against that.
Whatever the number is on Sunday, WBD wrote off a movie that is now projected to open at a figure that would be its acquirer’s record.
If the walk-up audience shows up, WBD has to explain why it walked away from that. If it doesn’t, expect “online fans don’t buy tickets” to become the lesson Hollywood takes from a number it spent three years creating.
Coyote vs. Acme opens August 28 from Ketchup Entertainment, directed by Dave Green and starring Will Forte, John Cena and Lana Condor, with James Gunn among the producers.
For the full tracking history, see our summer tracking roundup.
