Coyote vs. Acme opened to an estimated $15.4 million this weekend, per Deadline, off a $5.2 million Friday in 3,573 theaters.
That’s nearly five times the biggest opening in Ketchup Entertainment’s history — the $3.1 million debut of The Day the Earth Blew Up in March 2025 — for a movie David Zaslav and Warner Bros. Discovery decided was worth more dead than alive three years ago.
Coyote vs. Acme also pulled an A on CinemaScore, the exit poll that surveys opening-night audiences on their way out of the theater.
No Looney Tunes theatrical feature has ever gotten one, and only two Warner Bros.-produced animated movies ever have: The Iron Giant in 1999 and The Lego Movie in 2014.
Rotten Tomatoes now sits at 95% with critics and 94% with audiences, after the movie debuted at 100% when reviews first landed.
Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff, looked down, and didn’t fall.
The weekend chart
Spider-Man: Brand New Day took its fifth straight No. 1 with an estimated $22.2 million, pushing its domestic total to roughly $891 million, about $43 million from The Force Awakens and the all-time North American record, a chase we’ve been tracking since it passed Endgame.
That leaves Coyote vs. Acme in second place on the Sunday estimates, ahead of the seventh weekend of The Odyssey at $14.3 million. Monday’s actuals will confirm it.
Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars opened below both at around $8 million, meaning the cartoon WBD deleted out-opened a brand-new Ridley Scott movie from a major studio starring Jacob Elordi.
Three weeks ago, forecasts had this movie opening between $3 million and $8 million.
Then came $1.7 million in Thursday previews and director Dave Green declaring “We won”.
The walk-up crowd, the audience the studio’s math said didn’t exist, showed up.
The studio said “not releasable” once before
Quick history for anyone who joined late.
In November 2023, WBD shelved the finished Coyote vs. Acme as a tax write-off, meaning the company declared the movie a total loss on its taxes, reportedly around $30 million, a deduction that only works if the movie never comes out.
Releasing it themselves was off the table, so after a year of backlash, WBD sold it, and Ketchup paid a reported $50 million in 2025.
Batgirl went into that same vault first.
In August 2022, WBD killed the nearly finished $90 million movie starring Leslie Grace, with Michael Keaton’s Batman, Brendan Fraser, and J.K. Simmons, and buried Scoob! Holiday Haunt the same day.
DC Studios boss Peter Safran later told reporters the film “was not releasable” and praised the shelving as a bold and courageous call.
Except Simmons went on the record this summer and said the test score was never actually bad.
Then there’s Supergirl, which originally tested in the same range Batgirl did.
However, Gunn went with his own cut instead. It opened to $37.1 million, below even Joker: Folie a Deux.
So here’s the scoreboard as of this weekend.
The movie with the okay test score is still buried. The movie with the bad test score got released and lost a quarter of a billion dollars.
And the movie written off as worthless just posted a distributor record, an A from its audience, and the best CinemaScore in the 96-year history of Looney Tunes.
The studio’s judgment about what’s “releasable” has now been graded in public, and it flunked.
The vault is about to change hands
Batgirl can’t simply be un-deleted.
The write-off means WBD itself can’t put the movie out without unwinding that tax deduction. But Coyote vs. Acme just demonstrated the escape hatch in front of the whole industry: sell it to someone who can.
And the timing could not be louder.
Batgirl is currently evidence in federal court, with the 12 states suing to block Paramount’s purchase of WBD filing the deleted movie as an example of what mega-merger cost-cutting does to finished work.
The executives who made these calls are selling the company, and the vault goes with it.
Coyote vs. Acme just told the next owners exactly what WBD’s “worthless” is worth: $15.4 million in a weekend, an A from the audience, and a second weekend still to come.
