UPDATE 8/30: The weekend landed. Coyote vs. Acme opened to an estimated $15.4 million and took the first A CinemaScore in Looney Tunes history, a record debut for Ketchup. Original article follows.
Three years ago, Coyote vs. Acme was a line on a tax filing. This morning it has $1.7 million in the bank and a director posting a victory message.
The movie took in $1.7 million from Thursday previews in the U.S. and Canada, a figure that includes $446,000 from last weekend’s sneak screenings. Deadline has it projected for a plus-or-minus $12-$14 million opening weekend.
And on release day, director Dave Green put up an Instagram post that opens in all caps: the movie is finally, gloriously, in theaters, and that means one thing. “WE WON.”
What The Preview Number Is Worth
Start with the distributor. Ketchup Entertainment’s biggest release to date is the other rescued Looney Tunes movie, The Day the Earth Blew Up, which opened to $3.1 million in March 2025 and finished with $8.9 million domestic and $15.5 million worldwide. That was already the highest-grossing domestic movie in Ketchup’s history.
Coyote vs. Acme made more than half of that entire opening weekend on Thursday night alone.
A $15 million weekend would be five times that opening. It would nearly double Ketchup’s biggest movie’s whole domestic run in three days, and roughly match, in one weekend and one territory, what that film made worldwide.
One caution on reading Thursday numbers: family films underindex in previews, because the target audience is in bed on a school night. The matinees are where this movie lives or doesn’t, and those start today.
Critics At 95, Audience At 92
The critics’ number settled too. After debuting at 100 percent with its first 20 reviews, Coyote vs. Acme sits at 95 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with the full review count in.
The new number is the other one. The audience score opened at 92 percent.
That’s the first verdict from people who paid for a ticket, and it matches the critics almost exactly.
For a family comedy heading into a holiday weekend, a 95/92 pairing is the profile of a movie that plays broad and travels by word of mouth, which is the only marketing budget Ketchup has ever really had on this film.
‘We Won’: The Director Puts It On The Record
Green’s post reads like a message he’s been drafting for three years. He tells people they can now see the movie in a theater, in their favorite seat, with their favorite snacks and favorite people, laughing in a dark room with strangers. He congratulates everyone who made it happen.
Then he spells out who “we” is. The victory belongs to the cast, crew, and animation teams who spent years on the film, he writes, but it’s shared permanently with the audience that fought for its survival: “Your fight is the reason this film finally made it to the big screen.”
He thanks Ketchup for hearing that audience, and closes by calling the release proof that movies don’t just go away, that films are made to be seen, and that persistence won out.
Lana Condor, who stars alongside Will Forte and John Cena, added in the comments: “CONGRATULATIONS WE DID IT 💥💥💥💥 you’re a legend my friend.”
Read the post again and notice what it actually does. It assigns credit. Green doesn’t thank a studio for greenlighting a rescue, because the studio is the thing the movie survived. Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the finished film in November 2023 for a tax write-off, the third movie buried after Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, and only relentless fan backlash forced the reversal that ended with Ketchup’s reported $50 million purchase.
We’ve spent years documenting the pattern where Hollywood blames the audience when things go wrong. Here is the inversion, in writing, from the director, on release day: the audience is the reason the movie exists. Not a factor. The reason. That’s on the record no matter what the box office does.
What The Weekend Is Testing
This week’s tracking laid out the test. Awareness finally jumped to 40 percent on the strength of the reviews, but interest never moved off the 43 percent it held all summer. The audience for this movie is the audience that saved it, and nobody ever grew it past them.
So the weekend isn’t measuring a marketing campaign. There wasn’t one, not at studio scale. It’s measuring how many of the people who fought for this movie convert into tickets, now that the reviews and the awareness have finally done their part.
Three years ago this movie legally did not have an audience. Its director just told that audience they’re the reason it’s playing, and the first numbers land this weekend.
Coyote vs. Acme is in theaters now 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.
