Coyote vs. Acme (2026)

Director: Dave Green

Cast: Will Forte, Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Eric Bauza

Have I Seen It Before: Never. And there was a long stretch of time where we weren’t going to get to see the film at all.

Rest assured we’ll address that part again before we’re done.

Did I Like It: If you can get over the notion that only the Warner Bros. cavalcade of cartoon stars appear here, this film almost becomes—at least on a spiritual level—the sequel to <Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)>* we knew could have been out there.

It is zany, and dare one say, looney, and regularly funny, but it actually works within the confines of a legal drama, even if it is one largely played as satire. I’ll throw an extra bit of praise that you might not see in other reviews: There’s a slight structural parallel to A Few Good Men (1992) here, and this film avoids a mistake Reiner and Sorkin walked right into. Changing out Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Jessup for Foghorn Leghorn**, the entire legal strategy at the end of the film is deciding that the heavy wants to admit his malfeasance, as he doesn’t think what he’s accused of should be a bad thing at all. In A Few Good Men, the final shot is telegraphed minutes before they lower the boom, deflating some of the dramatic tension. Here, Will Forte gets the idea seemingly at the last minute, giving him an almost Bugs Bunny air—thematically appropriate—of cleverness at just the right moment.

The film is easily one of the most pleasing of the summer, and indeed the year. Which brings us to the controversy. Warner Bros. nearly took a tax write-off in lieu of releasing the film at all, citing that this film, along with a Scooby Doo holiday special, and the Michael Keaton-starring Batgirl, were simply not releasable.

Well. Not only is Coyote vs. Acme obviously releasable, it’s quite good. Tell me Batgirl was unreleasable again. I’m not going to believe you***.

*And we’re likely never to see that level of inter-conglomerate cooperation, unless Disney buys up Warner Bros., or the other way around. Which is not even in the competition for strangest thing that might come to pass.

**That pitch alone should have kept the film on Warner Bros. release schedule.

***I’ll believe that it doesn’t fit in with your current continuity of DC films, but hardly anything fits into that. Now what’s your excuse?

Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2019)

Director: Jake Castorena

Cast: Troy Baker, Eric Bauza, Darren Criss, Kyle Mooney

Have I Seen it Before: Nope.

Did I Like It: I’ve been on the record about not liking many of the string of DC animated films. The more essential the Batman story, the more epic in scope, the more disappointing the film ends up being*.

That’s kind of the beauty part of this film. The crossover comic putting the Dark Knight and the Heroes in the Half Shell barely meant much of anything, and the film has little to live up to, and passes those expectations.

First of all, the movie opens with Barbara Gordon (Rachel Bloom) handling things in the way only she can. I submit that there is no other character in the popular culture who is more mistreated than Babs. Warner Bros. cancels whole-ass movies starring her**. Birds of Prey (2020) flat-out forgets that she ever existed. And don’t get me started on Batman: The Killing Joke (2016). Let’s just say that sometimes I feel something less than ambivalent about the animated adaptations of beloved Batman stories.

The Turtles here are well-drawn, feeling modern but occasionally hearkening back to some of their well-known adventures. Better still, they’re all in awe of Batman (Baker, pulling double duty as Wayne and the Joker, and somehow evoking an essence of Conroy and Hamill in the process), and that feels incredibly relatable. I also think Donatello (Baron Vaughn) has a all-vibes crush on Barbara Gordon, which is almost too relatable.

The mashing of these two worlds may not feel like they would go together, but there’s something very nice about putting Batman in a state of discomfort. The re-worked comic covers over the ends credits replace the Outsiders of the 1980s with the Turtles, and that feels like an incisive parallel. We don’t get enough Batman stories that put him as the unlikely center of mismatched a team. There should be more.

The whole film becomes sort of charming, in the end. It’s no Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993), but it may just end up being my second favorite Batman animated film. The things I will do if Barbara Gordon is given her fair shot to shine.

How did I get through this whole review without complaining about how adding “vs.” to a movie title obscures the fact that it inevitably amounts to “this set of characters and this other set of characters initially have a disagreement and then decide that they must band together to combat a common foe.”

Well, I guess I just did.

*You can look forward to my inevitably less-than-enthused review of Batman: Knightfall sometime next year.

**When will I get over that? The answer is never.