It is reportedly said that Netflix made a bid for the now-shelved movie about the famous Looney Tunes character whose sole goal is to catch the Road Runner. Now, the bidding war may have more interested parties. The Coyote vs Acme family film, which stars John Cena, is the latest project to receive the shaft by Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav when he shelved the movie for a tax write-off as he famously did for the DC movie Batgirl and the family film Scoob: Holiday Haunt.
Deadline is now reporting that Paramount and Amazon are interested in the Warners movie that’s up for grabs. Amazon is making the consideration, although no bids have yet to be made. Paramount has been said to have made a bid. Warner Bros opting to make the project available for sale is giving them the opportunity to play hardball with the studios as they would want to cover somewhere over $70 million.
David Zaslav has yet to win over anyone paying attention to showbiz news. His decisions have been controversial and the Warners CEO would be just one of the many studio heads that the writers and actors protested against in the strikes this year. Zaslav painted himself as courageous when making these decisions to jettison these projects, stating, “We’ve spent the $100 million dollars and if we don’t release it, it’s gone. We don’t have any real benefit from it…The question is, should we take certain of these movies and open them in the theater and spend another $30 or $40 million to promote them? And [the] Warner Bros. team and HBO made a number of decisions. They were hard. But when I look at the health of our company today, we needed to make those decisions. And it took real courage.”
The statement made by Warner Bros when they announced the decision to halt the release of Coyote vs Acme cited the re-launch of Warner Bros Pictures Animation, saying, “With the re-launch of Warner Bros. Pictures Animation in June, the studio has shifted its global strategy to focus on theatrical releases. With this new direction, we have made the difficult decision not to move forward with Coyote vs Acme. We have tremendous respect for the filmmakers, casts, and crew, and are grateful for their contributions to the film.“