After several years in limbo, Coyote vs. Acme finally got its moment in the sun on Wednesday at its L.A. premiere.

It was a night that for a long time did not seem possible, after Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the film in November 2023 in favor of a tax write-off. Fans rallied around the project, though, refusing to let it die — until in March 2025, Ketchup Entertainment saved the film and set it up for a summer 2026 theatrical release.

Star Will Forte looks back at that period as “an emotional roller coaster,” admitting that despite how vocal people were being online to revive the film, “I didn’t think it would do anything.”

“I was just like, ‘They’re not hearing you, it’s not going to make a difference.’ And then they just kept going and it’s because of them the movie’s out,” Forte told The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet. “I had given up on it and I can’t thank these people enough. I always thought this movie was super special and the support from the community has meant so much. It’s made me feel sane; I felt gaslit for a while and their support, now the positive reviews coming out — [they] just make it feel like you’re not crazy.”

Coyote vs. Acme is a hybrid live-action and animation movie set in the Looney Tunes universe. It sees Wile E. Coyote deciding to sue the Acme Corporation after their products fail him one too many times in his relentless pursuit of the Roadrunner, with Forte as his inexperienced lawyer and John Cena as Acme’s attorney. And as Forte mentioned, the film is being released amid glowing reviews and very positive audience buzz.

“It’s so validating. I’ve been a part of a lot of projects that haven’t gotten great reviews that I have loved — MacGruber. I love it. People may hate it, but I love it, I’m so proud of it,” the actor said, noting that reviews are not everything but “in this case, I am accepting positive reviews and saying they do mean something, I’m doing a flip around.”

He continued that much like Wile E. Coyote going up against a big corporation, the film itself is an underdog, “so we need all the help we can get, and it feels like all these voices, the voices that helped us get the movie into the theaters, are helping spread the word about it being in the theaters. Hopefully people will listen to them and see these positive views and go like, ‘This movie deserves to be seen.’”

Cena echoed, “We’re here, we’re coming out in theaters, I just hope that everyone who used their voice shows up to see this thing.”

The BBC‘s Director General, Matt Brittin, has said the British broadcaster’s streaming service could benefit from a “public service algorithm” that allows it to function more like YouTube.

The striking plans, which Brittin warned was not “policy” at this stage, would see the BBC iPlayer opened up to creators and make the service more like YouTube, the platform that the exec oversaw in EMEA before joining the BBC.

In his first address to the industry today at the Edinburgh TV Festival, the former Google exec once again warned the BBC iPlayer had “fallen behind” rivals due a focus on content spend over technology in recent years. He first made similar noise in a town hall speech to staff in May soon after he became DG.

Brittion was careful to say this was “no fault of the team” at the BBC and that the content spend meant he “inherited incredible audience reach,” but leaves a puzzle over the iPlayer’s future and an immediate challenge in improving the iPlayer recommendations functionality.

His blue-sky solution was for the iPlayer to function more like YouTube by hosting creators from around the UK – “providing they stick to the guidelines we choose to set.”

He didn’t detail how this would be achieved, what the remuneration offer would be or why creators would choose to opt for BBC digital services over YouTube or other social media platforms, but it is still one of the more tantalizing ideas to be floated by a director general of the BBC for some time.

Brittin also called for the BBC to be “a more open platform” and that there was a need to “create sovereign media public space,” while adding the UK could build something “unadulterated by commercial interests, by algorithms that have other interests at heart.”

The service, which he dubbed ‘iPlayer 2.0″, would be based around “educating, informing and entertaining the public here and ideally around the world,” he said, adding it should be created “it in a way that’s not biased towards the incentives of a U.S. tech company or commercial interests. It should be biased towards what we want public service to be all about.”

It is likely the BBC, which is in the midst of cutting 2,000 roles to save around £500M ($679M), will have to cut programs to pay for improvements to the iPlayer. He noted that the BBC had shed £1.3B over the past decade and services and programs would inevitably come under pressure.

Brittin has spent his first 100 days at the BBC travelling to different parts of the mammoth organization to identify where to prioritize his efforts and how to wrestle with the type of existential crisis that outgoing BBC presenter Amol Rajan described earlier today.

Brittin admitted he had not “understood quite the severity” of the financial pressure heaped on the BBC. “Obviously, to get to that scale of savings, there’s uncertainty hanging over a lot more colleagues than those who will eventually leave the organization,” he added. “That’s really hard to deal with. But 90% of the people in the BBC will remain.”