They uncrushed 'Coyote vs. Acme' from a falling anvil and lived to tell about it

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Set us as preferred Early in November 2023, the night before Warner Bros.Discovery announced its decision to scrap “Coyote vs.

Acme,” opting instead to take a $30-million tax write-off on the hybrid live-action-animation film, actor Will Forte received enthusiastic news about the project.“I got a call from the producers saying they were ready to show us the movie, and they were so excited, and it was testing really well,” Forte, 56, recalls during a recent interview in Century City.“It was the very next day that we got the call that it was getting shelved.”Six days after that devastating blow to their collective morale, the cast and crew attended a “funeral screening” on the Warner Bros.

lot in Burbank to watch the film they’d worked on for the first time, one that, presumably, the public would never get to see.“In those six days, my brain was trying to make sense of it, and I felt like: It must not be very good then,” Forte explains with a doubtful expression.Reclining on an office chair on a hot July afternoon, the former “SNL” star appears pensive thinking back on that upheaval.“ ‘Maybe these guys just lost their heads a little bit,’ ” Forte says, speaking from the perspective of the deciders.

“ ‘They were too close to it.They had been working on it so long that they fell in love with this thing that just is not as good as they thought.’ ”But, as he would learn at the screening, the execs at WB were wrong.

“We went in and watched the movie and it was fantastic.”Forte continues, “All this confusion and frustration turned to a lot of anger.I worked through a lot of stuff over the course of a couple months.

And then eventually it was just like: It’s not healthy for me to feel these feelings.I just gotta let it go.”Thankfully, public outcry and a scrappy indie distributor...