'Looney Tunes' Is for Winners
If you don't know how to sell 'Looney Tunes,' get out of entertainment.
At a time when studios value IP, it’s been bizarre to watch Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) treat Looney Tunes with such avoidance. Even before the Discovery merger, the studio never seemed to know what to do with their classic cartoon in the 21st century after finding quite a bit of success throughout the 1990s with Space Jam, Tiny Toon Adventures, and airing reruns on Nick at Nite. That’s not to mention the licensing deal they worked out with Six Flags. If the Looney Tunes weren’t ubiquitous, most people could still identify Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and the rest of the gang.
Although Warner Bros. attempted to use Looney Tunes again with Space Jam: A New Legacy, like its predecessor, it was largely a family film designed to bolster the celebrity of its athlete star rather than resemble anything that made the animated shorts so memorable. When Discovery did take over Warner Bros., they quickly resolved to cede all ground in family animation to Disney, watering down the Cartoon Network brand into nothingness while doing little in the way of Warner Bros. Animation. When it came to the first fully animated and feature-length Looney Tunes movie based entirely on an original idea, The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Warner Bros. Discovery couldn’t even be bothered to show it on Max. Instead, they sold the rights to Ketchup Entertainment, which put the movie into theaters.
I went to see The Day the Earth Blew Up this past weekend, and it’s far from a dud the studio was seeking to offload onto a smaller distributor. It’s Looney Tunes! It’s an odd couple pairing between Daffy Duck and Porky Pig, and they’re dealing with a 1950s sci-fi, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque premise. It runs at a swift 90 minutes, has plenty of jokes, features terrific 2D animation, and always channels the anarchic yet clever spirit of the original Looney Tunes shorts. While it may not be blowing up the box office, neither is The Alto Knights, which Warner Bros. decided was worth backing (although in the latter case, I suppose it helps if you’re personal friends with WBD David Zaslav).
Warner Bros. also chose to bail on Coyote vs. Acme, a completed movie where the studio, drowning in debt, wanted to take the tax write-off, but now it looks like Ketchup is trying to come to that film’s rescue. Coyote vs. Acme should be an easier sell than Day the Earth Blew Up. It’s a live-action/animation hybrid with name actors (Will Forte, John Cena) and a great hook: after years of being thwarted by their defective products, Wile E. Coyote finally takes the Acme corporation to court.
It’s telling that Warner Bros. thought that this was somehow an impossible sell, but abandoning Looney Tunes seems like business malpractice. The company also removed the last of its classic Looney Tunes shorts from Max, and while those shorts will now come to Blu-ray in a new “Collector’s Vault,” it lowers the potential new audience. I’m a big advocate for physical media, but I’m also sympathetic that a lot of people don’t want to bother with Blu-ray players and would happily just use a Roku stick or the apps that come with a Smart TV. To wipe out a bunch of Looney Tunes classics in favor of…what, exactly? Again, IP is at a premium right now, people know who the Looney Tunes are, and your solution is apparently to pay money for a Jake and Logan Paul reality show? I would think you’d get a better return on “Duck Amuck,” but maybe the whole family can gather around and see if a Paul brother stumbles upon another corpse they can use for content.
It’s rare for any entertainment to endure across decades, but Looney Tunes does. When I was a kid, I was entranced by shorts that were made decades before I was born. Parents certainly don’t need to worry if Looney Tunes are appropriate for their kids (although the ‘80s and ‘90s handwringing about “violence in cartoons” certainly feels quaint today). Looney Tunes is reliable entertainment with name recognition. For Warner Bros. not to compete with other kids programming not only feels cowardly, but inconsistent. Other studios make superhero movies, but Warner Bros. didn’t give up on adapting DC Comics. Other studios make prestige television, but Warner Bros. didn’t call it quits on HBO. Either you’re a big media conglomerate designed to address all entertainment needs, or you’re not.
The truth is that Warner Bros. today is largely a vanity project for Zaslav. It will never pay down its tens of billions of debt, but he gets to play mogul for a while and hobnob with celebrities who wouldn’t give him the time of day when he was making fast cash off cheap reality shows with Discovery. Now that he has real assets like Looney Tunes, he can only see them as a shortcut to addressing debt rather than pillars of a successful media strategy. But it’s to Ketchup Entertainment’s benefit that Zaslav is a fool. They’ve already snuck one great Looney Tunes movie off of him, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Coyote vs. Acme is a much bigger hit.
