Coyote vs. Acme, the movie Warner Bros. Discovery tried to erase for a tax write-off, is tracking like the audience David Zaslav said wasn’t there has been waiting the whole time.
The Quorum’s new eight-week chart, published by Puck, has the film at 26 percent awareness and 43 percent interest ahead of its August 28 release, with both numbers climbing over the past two weeks.
Read that again. Interest is running 17 points ahead of awareness, the widest gap of any film on the chart. Every time someone hears this movie exists, the want-to-see nearly doubles. That is the tracking profile of a film with an audience its own studio refused to believe in.
The Quorum is a box office tracking firm that polls everyday audiences, measuring how many people have heard of an upcoming film and how many want to see it. In other words, it measures actual public demand, not studio math.
For where this fits in the full summer picture, see our summer 2026 box office tracking roundup.
The Movie WBD Tried to Bury
The history bears repeating, because the tracking is the punchline. Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the completed film in November 2023 to take a tax write-off, making it the third movie disappeared under Zaslav after Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt.
The fan backlash was immediate and relentless, and it worked. WBD reversed course, shopped the film, and Ketchup Entertainment picked it up for a reported $50 million in March 2025. The trailer leaned all the way into the saga with the tagline “The Film Acme Didn’t Want You to See.”
It’s part of a pattern we’ve documented for years: when audiences push back, Hollywood blames the fans. This time the fans refused to take the blame, saved the movie outright, and the survey data now says they were right about the demand all along.
The James Gunn Connection
For DC fans, there’s familiar names in the credits. James Gunn pitched the concept to Warner Bros. around 2015, shares the story credit with screenwriter Samy Burch and Jeremy Slater, and is a credited producer on the film.
Dave Green directs, Will Forte plays Wile E. Coyote’s down-on-his-luck lawyer, and the Acme Corporation’s slick corporate counsel is played by John Cena, Gunn’s Suicide Squad and Peacemaker leading man.
However, there is concern: James Gunn is just coming off the biggest bomb of his lifetime with Supergirl. Peacemaker Season 2, the follow-up to Superman starring Cena, also lost nearly 40% of its viewers. And Slater, who is a part of Gunn’s DCU team, just saw Mortal Kombat II massively bomb by taking the sequel in a different and questionable direction.
Late August Suddenly Looks Interesting
The same chart has the summer’s giants sorted: Spider-Man: Brand New Day leads everything in interest, while The Odyssey fights an awareness problem eleven days from release.
Down in the last weekend of August, the dumping ground of the calendar, sits the movie a studio literally wrote off, quietly building the healthiest demand curve of the back half of summer.
If it opens well, it won’t just be a win for Ketchup. It will be a receipt, printed by the audience, itemizing exactly what Warner Bros. Discovery threw away.
Coyote vs. Acme opens in theaters August 28.
