Never had Will Forte found himself so caught between art and commerce. The former Saturday Night Live star had received a call in November 2023 inviting him to a screening of the new Looney Tunes movie he’d just made, Coyote vs. Acme. Test audiences had loved it, and the producers were excited to finally share it with the whole cast. The very next day, like an anvil falling from the sky, Forte and his collaborators were crushed by the news that Warner Bros, the film’s studio, had decided to shelve the movie for a tax write-off.
The private screening still went ahead, though in the days leading up to it, Forte began to think, “It must not be as good as the producers thought. Maybe they were too close to it.”
That uncertainty evaporated quickly. In Coyote vs. Acme, Forte plays a hapless personal injury lawyer who helps Wile E. Coyote sue the Acme Corporation over their myriad products (rocket skates, bombs, catapults, anvils, etc.) that have backfired on him in his pursuit of the Roadrunner. Forte, and everyone else in the room, loved it, and as the lights went up, doubt and melancholy turned into frustration and confusion.
“We’re all kind of looking around at each other, like, ‘What the fuck is going on here?’” he tells Rolling Stone, adding. “You’re telling yourself, ‘I love this so much, this is so great, this is a movie my kids can see,’ and you forget, ‘Oh, right. This is a funeral screening.’”
