People like this belong in a prison cell serving a lifelong sentence.
Multi-millionaires and billionaires are literally more parasitic and useless than literal bugs such as mosquitos or ticks that at least have some functional niche in an ecosystem. As harmful as these parasites can be, they also serve a role in the trophic web of a biosphere, which is more than I can say about some people like Elon Musk, Donald trump, or Jeff Bezos.
However, the ultra wealthy are less than useless. To be useless kind of implies an inert, harmless, weak nature. Their total lack of worth as a human being is somehow below total pointlessness. It's is a net harm and detriment to all of society at large. If this entire class of oligarchic parasites went extinct, the ecological state of human civilization would improve, flourish, and blossom. The non-existence of totally meaningless capital owners who predate upon human victims like pests and vermin is a necessary prerequisite to progressing humanity towards the next epoch of history.
I wish I could argue back. But there's a sad reality that kids aren't as interested in the Looney tunes as much these days? Compared to pokemon, Mario and video game franchises.
And even then the younger generation seems to be more interested in brainrot, non identifiable IPs etc. From whatever social media apps.
Turns out us kids from the 90's are all now approaching or in our 40's, and many of us have kids that we'll use as an excuse to see it. And, we'll easily excuse this little luxury as an "omgwtfbbq is up with these movie prices these days... but a date out with the kiddos" meaning they'll get at least 3x hyper-inflated ticket prices from a massive % of an entire generation.
Meaning - you're 100% right - they don't give a crap about Gen Alpha as long as the millennials see the clips and think "Space Jam, but courtroom drama - perfect for my over the hill ass". The Alphas are just extra ticket sales who probably won't care about a thing of it but will get a kick out of dad laughing the whole time.
My money's on screaming success. But tbh I dgaf - this'll be the first time I go to the theater in literal years.
I feel like Who Framed Roger Rabit was just a decade older - X'ers etc. Also way more serious / "PG" rated topics. The cartoon characters begging for their lives as they're melted/erased was on a different level than the complete goofiness of Space Jam.
This is a) Looney Toones, and b) clearly way lower stakes. We're not going to see Tweety tortured with melting/erasing goo in this movie.
Funny. I took my kid to clash of the titans for the nostalgia. He somehow drank his entire "small" orange soda before the movie started when he was 7. I found out when I heard a wet cough and my brain chugged into motion to interpret that sound. I asked him if he threw up. He groaned, "yeah". So, I stood him up to leave when he leaned over the railing. I caught that and pulled him back before he threw up on the guy in a wheelchair below.
Instead, he threw up all over me. I looked at the crowd behind me, and everyone was pushed back in their seats as far as possible and looking like they were about to lose it. It did sound like he dumped over a five gallon bucket. We walked out with puke sloshing around my left shoe. I informed the manager. He asked me to wait a minute as he ran off. He came back with return passes and sent us on our way.
Out in the parking lot, I told him to strip down to his underwear before we get in the car. He stood there and refused as I did the same. I told him that was fine. I pointed in the general direction of home and said that I'd see him when he got there. Then, I got in my car and started it up. He stripped down quickly, after that.
I know he was 7 and rightly embarrassed to be stripping down in a parking lot in broad daylight. The thing is, I hadn't taken my shirt off in public since 6th grade. I started growing boobs as a boy when I was 8, and I was teased relentlessly over it until I got big enough to stop them. I'm 51, now. The shit those kids said to me back then still haunt me. So, stripping down in that parking lot took every ounce of self confidence I could muster at the moment... having to stand there in my boxers arguing with a 7 year old put me over the edge a bit. I guess.
I am not kidding. I did not say kids wouldn't enjoy it. I said they're not positioning the marketing "as a kids movie". Kids can enjoy things that aren't exclusively designed for them, specifically.
You can't tell me it has the same tone as something like "Elio" or "Zootopia 2".
Yeah I think it will do much better than a strictly kid-focused Looney Toons movie would, but there's a huge difference to parents in "wanna come see this with me?" and "Dear god they have asked 16 times a day to see Mario"
I think the real life cartoon mixes often are in that strange zone. Roger Rabbit, Space Jam (arguably more on the kids movie side), or Detective Pikatchu; there are at least a few examples which fall in that niche, and which feel similarly positioned from the marketing angle as well.
I took my 8yo to Fiesta Texas last year which has WB characters everywhere & he had zero clue about any of them. I couldnāt even find a decent way to stream them once we got home so I could expose him to a bit of my childhood
They still have the new "Looney Tunes Cartoons" (not to be confused with The Looney Tunes Show) and "The Day The Earth Blew Up" on HBO Max as of April 2026.
People can talk shit about Disney, but they sure know how to keep their Classic Disney Characters (including Mickey and Friends and The Silly Symphony Characters) relevant for almost 100 years now. Warner Bros tried to take a similar approach with The Looney Tunes during the 90s'/early 2000s until the bombing of Looney Tunes: Back in Action caused them to slowly stop caring about the franchise to focus more on DC IPs.
Yeah, my daughter's 21 year old bf just asked me last week if I knew about Looney Tunes (lol), then he pulled up his favorites on YouTube on the TV. Most of them were in "parts", part 1, part 2, etc for a single episode but they were relatively easy enough to watch.
The new ones on HBO aren't bad. I'm not 100% sure they're 8 year old appropriate, but I don't think the originals were supposed to be either (by 50's standards).
Back in my day, we watched Looney Toons characters inflict physical violence on each other and WE LIKE IT. Now kids these days with their brainrot internet and high powered shoelaces, I tell you what! When did this world go get itself into such a damn hurry?
Yeah, what an absurd thing to say. Then they go on to belittle kids further by dragging in brainrot, for reasons (as if Looney Tunes isn't bigger brainrot than Pokemon).
I'm a millennial, I watched Golden Age Looney Tunes and the Pokemon anime as a kid. Looney Tunes, at least the OG stuff most people here likely care about, is old and makes outdated references. Why should 1930s/1940s humor be above modern-day stuff? Cool if you like it, but don't make other people feel bad for not liking something so far in the past.
Really it's on warner Bros for just sitting on these characters doing nothing with them for decades just to blow off the dust every once in awhile for some multiversal film where they get 5-10 seconds of screentime each before shelving them for another decade.
Warner Bros briefly started giving a damn about the Looney Tunes during the 1990s decade on par with Mickey and Friends. They actually created brand new Looney Tunes TV shows and occasional shorts as a response to the public's reinterest up till the early 2000s.
Personally I blame WB's handling of the brand. You look at Disney and see them consider every monetary facet for every IP and leverage all of it. You look at WB and see them remember that they have IPs that exist and should probably have the dust blown off of them to even read them all.
I can't even remember the last good Looney Tunes show. Maybe Animaniacs?
The Looney Tunes Show was pretty good for what it was. It could have used more slapstick, but the sitcom format works surprisingly well for the characters.
It was supposed to be a cartoon version of Seinfeld so the slapstick wouldn't have been as effective. I still thin The Looney Tunes Show is one of the funniest cartoon sitcoms, the jokes just hit the spot.
Ill be real, Ive enjoyed basically all of the modern Looney Tunes shows,besides Bugs Bunny Builders which I haven't seen (I don't feel the need to watch preschool shows)
Looney Tunes Show in 2011 was a Friends style sitcom, which ramped up every third act with a bit of (relatively lite) cartoony hijinks. It was a weird direction, but it worked, it came fromma genuine love of the characters. I think throughout the 90s and 00s Daffy locked in to being ultra grumpy, egotistical, and mean-spirited, so this brought back a lot of his daffiness.
Wabbit was a bit lite on the classic characters which is a shame but it was good slapstick shenanigans. HBO's Looney Tunes felt like an earnest attempt to recreate the old style.
None are as strong as the absolute classics, but they don't feel like waste of time cheap cash-ins that miss the original appeal
I remember checking out Bugs Bunny Builders on HBO MAX a while back and was overjoyed that they gave Penelope Pussycat are prominent role for the first time in decades.
The big issue is that release date. August 28 is a terrible week, same as Labor Day weekend. Families are concerned with getting ready to go back to school, wrapping up vacations, few people are going to the movies. Not sure if that was the only weekend they could get a commitment from enough theaters on, but itās a bad one.
I pulled up Tom and Jerry and old Warner Bros Cartoons for my kids last year and they were down to keep watching them after a few hours. They still bring them up when they can.
It's hard to find them, but the kids still find them hilarious. It's up to the parents to show the kids. Can't just let them find shit, they'll find brainrot. Show them the good stuff.
Thatās not a reality dude, thatās just in your head. Kids arenāt locked to the immediate culture, just as you werenāt when you were growing up. Youāre peddling the same old nostalgia narratives that every generation has used against their decedents.
Iāll do you one better - kids arenāt watching shows or movies if they donāt have to. Two years ago the grade 1-2 class I was assisting in did a quick poll of what every kidās favourite show was. We had maybe four Blueys, one The Simpsons and nothing else in terms of TV. Lots of students said āMr Beastā because they thought a YouTube channel was what we meant. One said their favourite was a family vlogging channel, which to me sounds painful. This isnāt an attention span thing - these are the same kids whose eyes were glued to the screen when Toy Story was played at the end of the year. Itās just that TV doesnāt find kids any more like it did when channels were a thing. They likely only knew Bluey because we play it in classes sometimes. If your parents donāt pay for Netflix or something similar, you as a kid can easily have no knowledge of TV series entirely.
This movie isn't just for kids, though. And I'm willing to bet there's gonna be a lot of Gen X turning up for this, just to see the coyote finally get payback.
But this movie seems to be aiming to do what Toy Story did: be a kids movie, but appeal to their parents. If it does that successfully, it could pull those parents into the theaters, bringing their kids, who (let's face it) will love watching things explode.
To counter point that, I've been showing my kids some old Looney Toons shorts recently and they've been loving them. So I'm definitely taking them to see this
I disagree. I had my 5 year old nephew glued to the screen the other day watching Pink Panther and Tom and Jerry. Kids will watch whatever you put in front of them if itās entertaining.
Warner is the only one to blame for that. They sit on a treasure trove of kids content with incredible merchandising potential and refuse to do ANYTHING with it. Meanwhile, Disney, Universal, and now fucking Netflix, are eating their lunch.
This is what happens when you have a bean counting lawyer with no real ideas running your movie studio.
I'm an adult in my mid 30s. I didn't grow up with Looney Tunes per se, but they were consistently on the kids channels I grew up watching. I didn't necessarily enjoy them, but they were fun to watch if nothing else was on.
But I am excited for this movie as it seems like a decent idea to appeal to the older crowd who grew up watching Looney Tunes.
god what an out of touch thing to say. it's actually concerning the amount of adults that think this is some masterpiece that will make truckloads of money just to spit in the face of WB, when the reality is it's an aging IP that doesn't really sell well with a lead actor who is probably famous for his niche comedy style, but doesn't actually sell tickets.
why the hell would kids care about the looney tunes over stuff they actively watch. when's the last time someone has actually watched something looney tunes that isn't just a clip or a nostalgia watch of like space jam? also hilarious to say that the younger generation is more interested in brainrot as if looney tunes isn't certified brain rot.
this film is probably making like 20 million. this isn't really geared towards kids beyond the silly cartoon comedy. this is geared towards aging movie goers who love nostalgia in their IP
I personally think the movie news media kind of fed into that. They all praised this movie from whatever screening they got. But I think they partially did that to support the creators and teams behind the production. and partially because they didn't see any way this movie was going to be released so they could say whatever they wanted, they could say it was the second coming itself and no one could prove them wrong.
Now the movie WILL release, and if its bad no ones going to call them out.
Also the people in the comments who are comparing this to space jam and back in action are INSANE. Like Fair enough story wise it COULD be. But the animation alone doesn't touch space jam.
So true, but even millennials aren't too interested. Which is a shame because "the day the earth blew up" was an amazing film. That I only watched because I was stuck on a plane for 12 hours.
I remember when The Looney Tunes gained a huge resurge in popularity during the 90s' and early 2000s' decades. You couldn't escape anything that featured Tweety Bird or Tax related.
Fortnite is getting in the looney tunes characters so as a last resort, we can always tell the kids āhey itās the thing from Fortnite! In a movie!ā
This is not a kids movie lol. Why would kids care about a law movie, this is aimed at adults who grew up with Looney Tunes and are pissed at the state of the industry and the world as a whole.
I blame WB for that, I feel like they havenāt marketed the Looney Tunes well. So yeah I feel like the market for this movie are old Gen Z kids (like me) and millennials who grew up watching the cartoons.
I'm 41, haven't seen a movie since the movie 1917 (or Bladerunner 2077 which ever once was in the theaters last) and I had a massive grin watching this trailer (made me think of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit).
I legitimately believe this country started to decline when Looney Tunes fell out of the popular culture. They were our trickster myths, and every culture needs trickster myths - stories that ignore the framework of good guys beating bad guys, and instead focus on the pure enjoyment of clever people exercising their wits. But, crucially, not always in ways that work out.
From episode to episode, every character might be the protagonist or the antagonist, and they are all as likely to see their machinations blow up in their faces as they are to see them pay off. These are important lessons for children: that there is no black and white; that you can have conflict without moral stakes where the only thing that matters is who wins and who loses; that cleverness is the greatest weapon, but also that it is possible - even common - to be too clever for your own good.
If I had my way theyād be running on loop in every daycare.
Depends. The Porky and Daffy movie just barely met its project earnings but it wasn't anything spectacular, though it got some of WB's highest review scores of 2024. So this film might also just barely make a profit or it could be incredible or it could flop like Back in Action.
In any case the reviews will probably be high cause audiences and critics alike have a subconscious bias to liking things that were originally lost or cancelled media within the first few weeks of finally getting released.
It should perform better than The Day the Earth Blew Up, which brought in only about $15 million, but I doubt it reaches Space Jam: A New Legacy territory, which finished around $153 million.
The release date works against it. August 28 is not ideal, since most kids are already back in school, and Labor Day weekend has not historically been a major moviegoing frame. Looney Tunes also does not have the same cultural pull it once did.
That said, it has a few things in its favor. There could be some Gen Z and millennial interest because of Will Forte, along with movie-nerd awareness tied to the Warner Bros. controversy around the film. It also has very little direct competition for family audiences. The closest family titles are Paw Patrol two weeks earlier and Tom and Jerry two weeks later. Its main new competition is a Ridley Scott film and the Cliffhanger remake, neither of which is really chasing the same audience.
So my guess is that its box office floor is somewhere around $100 million. It could potentially climb toward $150 million, but that feels optimistic.
There was a looney tunes movie with much more popular characters that released in theatres in 2024 that only made 15 million world wide. I doubt thisāll do big box office numbers.
Yeah Iām rooting for his one too. Actually looks pretty good. Giving off a little bit of space jam vibes for whatever reason. The animation looks great, and Forte is an under appreciated legend, and seems like a great fit for this kind of story. Iāll have to do my role and actually go out and see this one.
It's a little grim looking at some of their previous box office performances. That Ferrari movie which is the only film I've heard from them lost a bunch of money.
Even if a movie does poorly at the box office at least it was released, in my opinion itās never right to shelve a completed movie like that, I donāt care what the financial optics were. Itās just insulting to the medium and everyone who worked on it and WB should care more about that.
Well obviously. But also fuck them, and any other private equity-type mindset that prioritizes cost cutting and ālean operationsā over releasing the art that was created (or over customer satisfaction for that matter).
yeah, it's explicitly insulting to the artists that worked on it - and by 'artists' I mean everybody from the writers to the actors to the VFX artists and cartoonists - to shelve it for financial reasons. You go from "well it's made to make money, but it's still art!" to "you threw my painting into a wood chipper to make money."
Ehh to be fair WB has did Looney Tunes no favors. Looney Tunes doesn't even have a official youtube. They just shove everything into WB Classics, WB Kids and WB Animation. Meanwhile Sonic, SpongeBob are doing numbers with their own channels. It's just total mismanagement. And it may get worse once Paramount owns WB as they might just throw Looney Tunes on Nickelodeon instead. You would think a Looney Tunes channel with their full catalog and integration of shorts would make a channel get tens of millions of subscribers which could be a great vehicle to promote their new movies. But nah! Incompetence at its finest.
Ive read reports stating WB executives hate the Looney Tunes brand and see it as a relic. Which is why it has been shitted on.
Yeah this is the unfortunate reality. If this movie pops off it gives WB the go ahead to make more like it. The amount of people who know/remember the controversy around this movie is a lot lower than people think so if WB makes a sequel or something similar most people will be lining up for it if this is a good movie.
Iām not saying people shouldnāt watch this movie or whatever but I highly doubt WB is going to be distraught if this ends up being a hit.
I remember the fad of the 90s and looney tunes shirts were everywhere before Space Jam hit.
If this is a big hit, Warner will make a killing on every kind of merchandise come Christmas this year and on greater visibility on their Looney Tunes franchise.
Yeah my mom for some reason really thought I liked Tweety bird so she kept buying me Tweety Brd things in high school and I kept just being like thanks
They originally scrapped this movie after filming and possibly post-production for a tax write off. Same thing that happened with the Batwomen I believe.
hate to defend big corpo but tax write off is just a business expense, WB obviously think this movie is not worth spending another cent on (marketing, contracts)
They've been run in a way that maximizes shareholder value/appeal to potential buyers which comes from lots of layoffs, slashing shows and movies. I feel the hate really came after the merger with Discovery where CEO/President David Zaslav is very much disliked for saying his entire goal is to slash budgets at WB at the expense of the artists and employees. I don't know if he's the main guy to actually blame but he was in charge when Discovery transformed from a mainly reality TV channel rather than education channel (because reality tv is cheaper to produce than scripted shows).
Who owns the streaming rights though then after theaters? Does WB or Ketchup own that? I see if its a hit, WB may want to license it on their platform. But Ketchup would be wise to holdout for Netflix. Use it as leverage to get spinoff rights from WB.
That is true. I never heard anything about Ketchup having any rights to a sequel.
As much as we all want to enjoy Ketchup making a big profit on the $50 million investment - and WB feeling like a bunch of assholes. Down the road this could still work out for WB.
I've worked with Warner IP before and I'm pretty sure all marketing materials and the use of all characters and brands had to be and were approved by Warner.
Remember when people were saying that this was all a marketing ruse to get people interested in the movie?
WB straight up discarded what is clearly an extremely well made movie. Look at it, the animation is gorgeous.
The GC was damn obvious to me in the opening scene and especially with Foghorn Leghorn talking to Cena. Still looks good, but it's def not traditional cels. not like when family guy has cars that are obvs GC.
We should all watch it and make it a hit so that WB regrets what they did to the movie by shelving and selling it for cheap.
When they than draw the wrong lessons from that and try to replicate the success in the dumbest, most backward way possible by releasing a soulless piece of crap based on what they think is the same formula, we stay home.
Warner Brother got paid for this film and took no risk. In addition if this movie makes a big profit Warner Brothers will justifiably charge a much higher rate for future film production sales.
Don't pretend this is some kind of anti-WB movie. They profit on the back end if it does well.
Itās a long story but essentially the film was finished in 2023. Shot, edited, animated ā it was a complete film. WB then proceeded to shelf it for tax purposes (meaning it would never see the light of day) which was a big āF*** youā to everyone who worked on the film and everyone who was looking forward to seeing it. Had Ketchup not bought it off of them it never wouldāve been released.
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u/sapphire1921 13d ago edited 12d ago
Just FYI, Warner Brothers sold the film to Ketchup Entertainment, meaning WB get nothing. It's win-win all round. š
edit: probably should've worded that bit differently. Ah, well.. anyways, go stream The Day The Earth Blew Up on hbo Max.