Coyote vs. Acme is not on any subscription service. It is $24.99 to buy or $19.99 to rent on Prime Video, with the same purchase price on Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube Movies & TV. On FlixPatrol’s Nov. 11 reading of Prime Video’s U.S. movie chart, that rental sat at No. 5, ahead of Jason Statham’s Mutiny and ahead of Warner Bros.’ own Practical Magic 2.
That one line on a streaming chart is the punchline to a three-year joke Warner Bros. Discovery told on itself: a finished movie buried for a tax write-off is now out-earning a title the same studio released this year.
Where to Watch It at Home
The digital release went live at midnight ET on Sept. 29, after a month in theaters alone (IndieWire). That gap is the inverse of the strategy behind Madden hitting theaters and Prime Video the same night; Ketchup Entertainment banked a full run of ticket sales before letting anyone watch it at home.
Prime Video listed it at $24.99 to buy and $19.99 to rent at launch, a price confirmed separately by IGN. A rental gives 30 days to start watching and 48 hours of access once playback begins (New York Post).
No subscription home has been named. Ketchup handed the pay-1 window and downstream rights to V10 Entertainment back in April (Deadline), and at digital launch there was still no streamer attached. HBO Max is not in the chain at all; Ketchup owns the worldwide rights, not Warner. 4K, Blu-ray and DVD editions are up for preorder with no confirmed street date. Availability checked Nov. 12, 2026.
Three Years, in Order
- April 2022. Warner pulls the film from its July 21, 2023 date and slots Barbie there instead.
- November 2023. The completed film is shelved and written down for $30 million. It cost $70 million to make (Deadline).
- Nov. 13, 2023. Warner reverses course and lets director Dave Green shop the film, with Amazon named as a contender (The Hollywood Reporter). Buyers see it in early 2024 at a price near $70 million. Studio sources tell Deadline there are no offers.
- March 31, 2025. Ketchup closes the worldwide purchase for around $50 million, outbidding Paramount and Netflix (Deadline).
- Aug. 28, 2026. Theatrical release. A $15.9 million opening, second behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day (The Numbers).
- Sept. 29, 2026. Digital purchase and rental go live on Prime Video.
- Nov. 11, 2026. No. 5 on Prime Video’s U.S. movie chart.
Director Dave Green marked the theatrical opening on Instagram with a line that reads very differently now than it would have at the shelving: “This is a celebration, it’s proof that movies don’t just go away,” he wrote, alongside a shorter post declaring “WE WON.”
https://www.instagram.com/p/DcmCTHGPw9_/
What the Chart Run Proves
Ketchup paid roughly $50 million for worldwide rights and spent about $10 million marketing the film, the biggest marketing push in the company’s history (Deadline). The $15.9 million opening was comfortably ahead of Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars, which took $8 million the same weekend off a $70 million budget.
By mid-November, The Numbers had the theatrical run at $60.1 million domestic and $120.1 million worldwide. A separate tally circulating among box office trackers credited the film with passing Supergirl to become the summer’s highest-grossing movie produced by Warner Bros:
None of that settles whether Ketchup actually turned a profit. Theaters keep roughly half of ticket sales, and Ketchup pre-sold foreign territories to offset its spend, which is a different ledger than box office gross implies (Variety). What is not in dispute is the demand. “The movie did well partly because of rallying from fans,” Box Office Theory’s Shawn Robbins said. “But it turned out to be a good movie.”
FlixPatrol tracks chart position, not actual viewership, the same caveat that applies whenever one of these charts is used as proof of anything, including the recent case where Netflix’s own chart disagreed with itself. Position is still the only public signal available here, and it puts a three-year-old write-off above Mutiny, which had already spent 58 days in Prime Video’s U.S. top 10 on a $30.7 million worldwide gross against a $40 million budget, and above Practical Magic 2, which took $76.8 million in two weeks on a budget nearly that size.
By the Numbers
- $30 million: the write-down Warner took on a film that cost $70 million to make.
- $50 million: what Ketchup paid for worldwide rights, beating offers from Paramount and Netflix.
- $15.9 million: the opening weekend gross, second on the chart behind Spider-Man: Brand New Day.
- $120.1 million: the worldwide gross The Numbers had tallied by mid-November.
The Film Warner Buried
Dave Green directs from Samy Burch’s screenplay, with the story credited to Burch, James Gunn and Jeremy Slater and loosely drawn from Ian Frazier’s 1990 New Yorker piece “Coyote v. Acme.” Will Forte plays billboard attorney Kevin Avery, Lana Condor plays his niece and firm intern Paige, and John Cena plays Buddy Crane, the Acme lawyer and Kevin’s old rival from law school.
The firm’s name is the film’s best in-joke: Avery, Jones and Maltese, after Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and screenwriter Michael Maltese, who created Coyote and Road Runner with Jones in 1949 (Movie Locations). Every live-action location is in and around Albuquerque, including the UNM Film and Digital Arts building standing in for Acme headquarters and the Bernalillo County Metropolitan Court rotunda, where the press corners Kevin.
The voice cast carries more weight now than it did at release. Eric Bauza, who died Oct. 25 at 46 of natural causes, voiced Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and Foghorn Leghorn in the film, and at the 2024 Annie Awards he used Daffy’s voice to plead with Warner Bros. directly to release it (The Hollywood Reporter). “In Coyote vs. Acme he did Foghorn Leghorn as a scary, evil villain,” Looney Tunes Cartoons producer Alex Kirwan said of the performance.
A studio spent $30 million to make a finished movie disappear. Three years later it is in the Prime Video top five, selling for $24.99 a copy.
