Signs of Genius

When I showed my kids the Road Runner cartoons on DVD years ago, I concluded that the Bat-Man sequence is the funniest 52 seconds of animation ever committed to celluloid. So, like generations of Looney Tunes fans, I was dismayed when Warner Bros. Discovery unceremoniously cancelled a Wile E. Coyote movie in 2023 to write it off against tax. Coyote vs. Acme, a mix of animation and live action along the lines of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, was based on a 1990 New Yorker column by Ian Frazier, giving hope to writers of ephemeral humour columns everywhere that they too could rake in the big Hollywood bucks. The movie tested extremely well in preview screenings, and had some solid comic leads in Will Forte and John Cena. But none of that was enough to save it from the clutches of CEO David Zaslav. After a public outcry, Warner went through the motions of shopping it around to other studios, but rejected all offers; eager fans who’d hoped that sanity would prevail realised that they’d been…