Coyote vs. Acme went from tax write-off to a $15.4m opening

Warner Bros. Discovery wrote Coyote vs. Acme off for $30 million. Ketchup Entertainment paid $50 million for it. Audiences have now had their say, and they sided with Ketchup.

The film opened to $15.4 million in second place, according to Deadline. Over the Labor Day weekend it held third, with $11.3 million from 3,727 venues.

That is not a phenomenon. It is something more awkward for the studio that buried it: a perfectly normal, perfectly healthy release.

How a finished film ends up in a drawer

Coyote vs. Acme was dated for 21 July 2023, then moved to make room for Barbie. In November 2023, Warner shelved it outright and took the write-off. In March 2025, Ketchup bought it.

Shelving a finished film tends to be described in the careful vocabulary of strategy. In practice it meant a company had concluded the tax treatment of the film was worth more to it than the film was.

The cast and crew, Variety has reported, held what they called a funeral screening.

The arithmetic

Ketchup paid $50 million and recovered $20 million by selling foreign rights, per Deadline, then spent around $10 million on marketing. Whether that leaves the distributor in profit depends on the full theatrical run and on how the rentals split, and nobody has published those figures yet. So don't let anyone tell you it has already made its money.

What can be said is that the opening justified the bet.

Director Dave Green marked release day online. "This is a celebration, it's proof that movies don't just go away," he wrote. "We make work so it can be seen and shared — that's the whole reason we do what we do."

You can read that as gracious. You can also read it as the politest available way of making a point.

The number to watch

The final domestic total, and whether it clears the $30 million Warner wrote the film off for. Once a shelved title out-earns its own write-off, the next studio to consider the same manoeuvre has a much harder conversation ahead of it.