Supergirl
The movie Warner Bros. tried to delete for a tax break has now out-grossed the DC tentpole the studio actually bet its summer on.
By Becky Monroe — The Cinephile, CelebnMusic247
Here is a sentence nobody at Warner Bros. wanted to read in 2026: Coyote vs. Acme — the finished Looney Tunes movie the studio shelved in 2023 to claim a tax write-down, then sold off to Ketchup Entertainment for about $50 million — has earned more money than Supergirl, the DC Studios tentpole the same studio released with the full weight of its summer marketing machine behind it. MovieWeb flagged the crossover this week: Coyote vs. Acme has grossed $126.96 million worldwide, nudging past Supergirl’s $126.09 million to stand as the highest-grossing Warner Bros.-produced movie of Summer 2026.
The paths could not have been more different. Supergirl cost roughly $200 million to produce (before marketing) and was expected to be one of the season’s anchors; its roughly $126 million worldwide total has been one of the summer’s defining disappointments, and — as MovieWeb notes — the second straight DC summer release to land in the low $100 millions after Superman’s modest-by-its-standards run. Coyote vs. Acme cost a reported $70 million to make, was treated as literally worthless by its own studio for accounting purposes, and then became a cause célèbre: fan campaigns, a very public #ReleaseCoyoteVsAcme movement, and eventually a rescue deal with Ketchup Entertainment that put it in theaters on August 28, 2026.
The film it rescued turned out to be the kind audiences reward. Directed by Dave Green and written by Samy Burch, Jeremy Slater and DC Studios co-CEO James Gunn himself, the live-action/animation hybrid follows Wile E. Coyote (voiced by Eric Bauza) as he finally sues the Acme Corporation over its defective products, hiring down-on-his-luck lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) to take on Acme’s counsel, played by John Cena. A courtroom comedy about a cartoon character suing a corporation for selling him faulty goods, released by a company that acquired it after a corporation tried to bury it — the meta-joke has written itself for months, and audiences showed up for it.
The margin matters less than the meaning. $126.96 million against $126.09 million is a nose, not a rout — and on raw production budgets Coyote vs. Acme is also simply the cheaper success: it has nearly doubled its reported budget before ancillaries, while Supergirl would have needed several times its current gross to break even theatrically. One was marketed as an event and played like a shrug; the other was marketed as a rescue mission, and fans treated buying a ticket as a vote.
The 247 Take — Studios have run the tax-write-down play before, but Coyote vs. Acme is the first time the audience got to grade it in public, at the box office, against the studio’s own flagship. The lesson is not “never shelve a movie.” It is that in 2026 the internet keeps receipts, fan campaigns have real market value, and a $70 million movie people demanded will beat a $200 million movie nobody asked about. Somewhere in Burbank, an accountant is doing very quiet math.
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