Hitting theaters on August 28 is director Dave Green’s film COYOTE VS ACME.
After decades of being blown to bits by bombs, demolished by dynamite, mangled by magnets, battered by boulders, trampled by trains, tricked by tunnels, sprung by springs, steamrolled by steamrollers, maligned by misfires, bedeviled by bungees, rattled by rockets, backstabbed by bat suits, rocked by rocket skates, upended by unicycles, quaked by quake pills, rubberized by rogue bands, and hurled headlong off every cliff in the Southwest, Wile E. Coyote (Genius) finally fights back. Teaming up with billboard accident lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), he takes on slick corporate counsel Buddy Crane (John Cena) and ACME, Inc., the profit-obsessed conglomerate behind every one of the Coyote’s chaotic catastrophes.
The early reviews are praising the long-awaited film:
The Wrap says: “It’s all very intelligent and moving, but is “Coyote vs. Acme” funny? Yes. “Coyote vs. Acme” is gut-bustlingly hilarious. Dave Green knows these Tunes by heart, and the comic timing on this film’s countless sight gags is on par with some of the best Looney Tunes shorts.”
The Hollywood Reporter says: “It’s a pleasure to report that the film is a hilarious delight, one of the best live-action/animation films ever, and will be treasured by Looney Tunes fans (and who isn’t one?) who will be thrilled seeing their favorite cartoon characters return to the big screen.”
Pete Hammond at Deadline writes: “I can tell you this delightful gem of a movie is, for me at least, ironically not only the best Warner Bros. film released so far this year, it also is, hands down, the best animated/live action ‘toon since Robert Zemeckis’ classic Who Framed Roger Rabbit hit screens four decades ago (sorry Space Jam). I laughed out loud throughout this terrific concoction that is smart, funny, heartwarming, and winning in every way.”
For 30 years Steven Price has been composing soundtracks for lauded movies in diverse genres. From the space opera of Alfonso Cuaron’s GRAVITY to the war-torn battlefields of the Brad Pitt-starring FURY, not to mention a four-time action-comedy collaboration with Edgar Wright dating back to 2013’s THE WORLD’S END, his work has amplified stories, loading them with thrills and emotion.
But in Coyote vs. Acme, Price faced perhaps his greatest ever challenge. “I remember our director, Dave Green, first describing the project to me as ‘a children’s legal thriller,’” Price laughs. “Where the hell do you start with that?”
The Coyote vs. Acme (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) is scheduled to release on August 20, 2026, just ahead of the movie’s theatrical release on August 28, 2026. You can currently pre-save the album on the Coyote vs. Acme Spotify Pre-Release Page.
As it happens, where Price found his start-point was in the character of Wile E. Coyote himself; how he has always existed as part of a famous collective and was now, in this feature-length story, going to essentially branch out on his own.
“Sure, this movie has many cameos from other characters in it, but fundamentally, it boiled down to this idea that we were going to focus on Wile E. and take him on his own adventure. And that along the way you as an audience would find out about, and feel for, this character in a way you never had,” Price recalls of his eureka moment.
So it was that the composer researched classic tracks from the Looney Tunes universe, “all those guitars and hints at Americana” and infused them with an added fragility, to echo the coyote’s plight. “Let’s face it, poor old Wile E. has had a shocker for years and years,” Price chuckles. “All those awful pieces of ACME kit he’s bought have always let him down. It was such fun to take that running joke and get under the covers of it, to bring it to life, musically.”
Like so many of the Coyote vs. Acme creative team, Price grew up on Looney Tunes, just as his own kids are doing now. “What I realized when I watched my kids watching him was that we’ve always seen him as this hapless idiot who just keeps doing the same thing over and over, believing the hype all the time. This time it was nice to see him reach the end of his tether and be a bit broken. One of my favorite scenes in the film comes really early on, when he’s sitting in his cave, reflecting on all the disasters he’s had, and just looking utterly despondent. That’s a side to him you’ve never seen.”
And then there were the two distinct worlds that had to coexist, the collision of the Looney Tunes world with our own, which gave Price “some really interesting places to go to” – two approaches to scoring that would coalesce into a singular soundscape.
“The two musical worlds happening in this movie at once are firstly the Looney Tunes approach, which is to hit every single detail that you’re seeing on screen. If something’s descending, the music’s descending. If something’s shooting up in the air, the music’s following it. And it’s all very, very tightly scored to picture,” Price explains.
“The second is this more emotional, almost serious side, which comes out in Will Forte’s character and in the courtroom, where we wanted to be more stirring and have the score playing different tricks. It was a rare treat, in that I could play with those two very different styles and turn them into one special thing.”
Carsten Kurpanek, the editor of Coyote vs. Acme, is particularly evangelical about what Price ultimately achieved, crediting his score as being perhaps the most critical part of making the movie the success it is; for giving Wile E. Coyote the story and soundtrack he has always deserved.
It’s a compliment that Price doesn’t take lightly, not least as he is aware that Coyote vs. Acme is a movie that Kurpanek took so seriously he even went out one day shortly after he had finished editing to have his own Wile E. Coyote tattoo. “This was a two-and-a-half-year process for me, so by the end of it I felt so connected to the character that I wanted to memorialize him on my skin,” Kurpanek reveals.
The acclaimed editor, who has worked on everything from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to World War Z, has enjoyed a fruitful working relationship with Dave Green, ever since the director came out of college and he started editing his shorts. And Kurpanek says he’s never been more impressed with a score than the one Price created.
“I must give a huge shout out to Steven because I can’t stress enough what a fantastic job he did. When you’re first starting to edit a movie, before the score’s been done, you use scores from previous movies, as a temp track. It was so difficult to find any pre-existing music that walked the fine line that this movie had to,” Kurpanek says.
“If you go super serious, you undercut the humor. If you go too bouncy, you undercut the drama. The orchestrations that Steven created tread this wonderful line, this whimsicality that supports the serious moments but is never not fun. He knocked it out of the park.”
Of all Price’s achievements, however, his greatest undoubtedly involved a 40-piece choir doing something remarkably silly, at arguably the most legendary studio on the planet. A brainwave that would define the unmistakable sound of Coyote vs. Acme – and pretty much break the internet in the process.
“I got obsessed with the idea of having this professional choir singing an array of the Road Runner’s signature ‘Meep Meeps!’ all the way through the recording sessions, in Studio One at Abbey Road, of all places,” Price chuckles.
“It came to me because I got to thinking how the Road Runner is constantly in Wile E. Coyote’s head, driving him mad all day long with this stream of mocking ‘Meep Meeps!’ And the silliest version of that I could imagine going on in his head was one sung by a full classical choir, taking it all incredibly seriously, ‘Meep Meeping’ their way through things like Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.”
