The Brilliance of the Coyote vs. Acme Poster
(The following contains major SPOILERS for Coyote vs. Acme - Please go see this film!)
It’s wonderful to know we live in a world where this film beat the odds and made it to the big screen. Ketchup Entertainment did a great job with marketing, with the first trailer especially proving that it was too appealing an idea for audiences not to be interested. The trailer brilliantly poked fun at the behind-the-scenes story of Warner Bros.’ plan to shelve this piece of art simply for a tax write-off, using the studio as a stand-in for Acme, with the tagline “The Movie Acme Doesn’t Want You to See” and the statement that “the Acme corporation is releasing this film for accounting purposes only.” It’s amazing that the comedy that was almost shelved should deliver such a strong, serious message about the destructive power of mega corporations. However, a trailer is just one part of marketing and another area with brilliant commentary is the main poster.
The poster in question features Wile E. Coyote pushing a bomb up a hill towards a waiting Road Runner who will, no doubt, run away before the bomb goes off. It’s a classic Road Runner image. But in a way, the poster declares the plot of the film in just this one depiction. As attorney Kevin Avery and his team search for evidence to help with their case, they learn of something called Project Sisyphus, a program to test dangerous products on cartoons, whom they consider disposable, before improving them for humans. This explains why every product Wile E. has tried has backfired on him. It was supposed to. But the real significance comes at the name of the project, which is a metaphor for all the Coyote vs. Road Runner cartoons over their entire history, as well as the theme of the film.
Sisphyus is a character in Greek mythology who cheats death and is condemned in the underworld to push an immense boulder up a hill for eternity, only for it to roll backwards every time it nears the top. This is basically the image in the poster, but applied to Wile E. Coyote, thus foreshadowing the main conspiracy visually in a way that audiences don’t realize is technically a spoiler, at least if they’re familiar with Greek mythology. But not only that, it’s a perfect image that encapsulates Wile E. himself. The formula is that he always comes close to catching the Road Runner but never succeeds, yet he also always cheats death in the process, thus continuing the cycle. Even in the end of this film, he’s doomed to not catch him but keeps trying anyway. The only time he might have succeeded was during the congressional hearing, in which he discovered that somehow, Road Runner considers him his friend. Despite this being a perfect metaphor for the trope that’s defined simple cartoon characters, the film treats this as inspirational, that being seemingly doomed to fail doesn’t mean that one shouldn’t keep trying. The character of Kevin Avery is in a similar position, but the ending also offers hope that he will at last find success. It’s a wonderful metaphor that’s all summed up in one perfect poster.
Posters nowadays usually follow the same formula, showcasing the stars and conveying the general genre and tone, but hardly anything deeper. It’s rare to find a poster like this that conveys so much about the film in one image, and it’s unknown whether Warner Bros. would have employed the same or similar marketing strategy had they distributed the film like they should have. Such wonderful creativity should be rewarded by a successful theatrical run, so that more films like it will be released.
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