I think Disclosure Day and Coyote vs. Acme are the same movie.

Stick with me.

DISCLAIMER: Lots of spoilers ahead.

OTHER DISCLAIMER: Lots of opinions ahead.

In Steven Spielberg's DISCLOSURE DAY (2026), a lone man steals government property and alien technology to expose the truth behind cruel experiments and inhumane imprisonment conducted on aliens that has been covered up for decades.

In Dave Green's COYOTE VS. ACME (2026), a cartoon coyote sues a powerful company for faulty equipment exposing the truth behind cruel experiments and inhumane treatment conducted on cartoons that has been covered up for decades.

It was while watching the latter, a particular scene struck me so hard that it made me see a parallel between these two movies and tumbled me down this revelatory cliff face.

But first, a little more description of both films to better illustrate my point for those who may not have yet seen these movies.

(But I do encourage you to before reading further. Final warning.)

DISCLOSURE DAY starts us on the brink of WWIII. But that doesn't register for DANIEL KELLNER (played by Josh O'Connor) because he has just come across something that will change the world. He's found archival evidence of alien torture and experimentation going back to the 1950s. And not just that, he's also found alien technology that allows someone to mentally teleport so you can be in one place and have a full conversation with someone somewhere else.

MARGARET FAIRCHILD (played by Emily Blunt) has a a sleeper cell awakening, unlocking a psychic ability to read people's minds and can suddenly speak in an alien dialect. She terrifies the world with this ability on live TV while delivering a weather report making her an instant government target.

When Fairchild and Kellner get together, they discover they both have the same childhood trauma of being abducted by aliens and given what seems to be an empathic super power that brings the story to the inevitable intersection of a world war about to erupt, a government entity being exposed for crimes against life, and the reveal that we’re not alone in the universe. Finally, everyone calms down ready to "listen."

COYOTE VS. ACME follows WILE E. COYOTE as he pursues the ROAD RUNNER in his most basic want: to eat him. We see Coyote is an ACME addict, buying product after product to hit his goal, but each product fails him at the last moment.

-- An ACME magnetic glove is attracted to a truck instead of the magnets the Road Runner has ingested.
-- An ACME catapult does not let Coyote go but instead slams him into the ground.
-- An ACME pair of "rocket skates" malfunction to great and ridiculous heights.

It's when Coyote sees an ad for the Avery, Jones, and Maltese Law Firm that he gets the idea to sue ACME for personal injury. Through some serious arm-twisting, KEVIN AVERY (played by Will Forte) joins the fight, and off we go to play “David and Goliath” against the mighty ACME Corporation.

It's when we find out about a secret "PROJECT SISYPHUS" run by DR. LORRE (animated as the late, great Peter Lorre) that the whole case is blown wide open and BUDDY CRANE (played by John Cena) and FOGHORN LEGHORN must testify before Congress to make their case that hurting cartoons is harmless when it comes to testing products for humanity.

It was this montage of repeatedly testing horrific products on these poor cartoons that made me think... DISCLOSURE DAY!

But Avery sees the humanity in Coyote and the other cartoons, and he decides to fight for their right to not be harmed.

What both films give us is a giant neon sign highlighting EMPATHY.

When I saw DISCLOSURE DAY, I was frankly disappointed. I am a life-long fan of Steven Spielberg, John Williams, and David Koepp. I still remember the day I bought my very first CD with my allowance money. It was a John Williams best of album. (I was a really fun kid.) But even with that combination, walking out of the theater, I couldn't help but feel let down.

The poster has a UFO on it. I was promised aliens in the trailer. I was told this was decades in the making. But for a movie about aliens, there were very few aliens!

The movie centered around a WWIII threat that I kept forgetting about, because it was not big enough on screen to remember, and characters I wasn't given enough time to get to know before throwing them into "they're going to survive this" action.

Then, we get to the point of the film: the reveal that the U.S. government has been harboring alien evidence for decades in order to steal their technology.

I just thought... yeah, and?

Maybe it's because I've become so jaded in this day and age in terms of what the U.S. government is hiding that the reveal of aliens being real just wasn't very exciting.

Now, if it were revealed that the aliens, or the alien technology the U.S. government was strip-mining was being used to push WWIII forward or was going to be the tool to keep us safe from nuclear fallout, then I'd see a bigger drive to want to keep that all secret. But there seemed to be no connection from the aliens to the impending war except the reveal that we're not alone somehow calmed everyone down enough to realize these petty wars are just not important.

I wish that was the case. But in 2026, that's a hard sell. I can imagine that we'd see aliens and just think it was A.I., a distraction, or rude that they weren't saving us from ourselves.

So with all that to say, the idea of "empathy" got lost. The changing focus from religion to war to "we're not alone" pushed “empathy” to the background in favor of train collisions and cars bursting through houses.

Coming back to COYOTE VS. ACME, this is a movie that has the exact same message about being empathetic toward "creatures" or "beings." In this case, it's cartoons. And what this film did that DISCLOSURE DAY did not, was have the cartoons front and center from the get-go.

Aliens were held back in DISCLOSURE DAY for quite a while to give us intrigue and tension, but again, from the marketing, we knew it was aliens. So why not just lean in and give us aliens from the first minute?

It felt like DISCLOSURE DAY didn’t trust the audience.

COYOTE VS. ACME embraced and also pandered.

Yes, "pander" is a bad word when it comes to nostalgic reboots, remakes, and reheats, but I was so entertained by the fierce leaning in the filmmakers did on their own film. They knew their audience, they knew the year, they knew their genre, and they did not hold back.

The law firm taking up Wile E. Coyote's case, for example, Avery, Jones, and Maltese, was named for Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Michael Maltese. All three men were creators of the original LOONEY TUNES.

And for another example, the film mostly takes place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A classic line from Bugs Bunny himself is about how he gets himself lost taking "a wrong turn at Albuquerque."

I was tickled that the world of the Looney Tunes came back to tell a new story that cleverly balanced between the classic cartoons of yesteryear and a situation we're finding ourselves in today when it comes to big corporations keeping the little guy down. (Interesting meta take considering the behind the scenes controversy on the film’s release, but I'll come back to that.)

But the movie also did not over-complicate the plot. There were a lot of moving parts, no doubt about it, but the inevitable intersection of Coyote seeking justice, “PROJECT SISYPHUS” being revealed, and David knocking out Goliath all felt inevitable and earned. I mean, it's all right there, those three things are all a rose by any other name, aren't they?

There was a simplicity to the storytelling that DISCLOSURE DAY couldn't accomplish with all what it wanted to say. COYOTE VS. ACME brought everything back to the main theme. And when the ending came, it felt satisfying and inevitable. My eyes may have welled up. (May... have!)

Bottom line, COYOTE VS. ACME gave us beloved and well-known characters that we know inside and out and put them in our own world to tell a story that resonates with us now. (Not unlike BARBIE (2023)).

And DISCLOSURE DAY was too vague and too expansive to stick the landing. We don’t know the characters enough or the world, so my thought is we either needed a half hour less to keep the story streamlined and lean, or, we needed another half hour to dig deep into these issues and characters.

For two movies with basically the same plot and story, COYOTE VS. ACME did it better. But I think it’s because there is more baked into the zeitgeist that gave COYOTE VS. ACME a leg up when DISCLOSURE DAY had a much steeper cliff to climb. (Shout out, Sisyphus.)

Before I sign off this post, I have a question. It's a cynical one, but bear with me.

So for those who don't know the behind the scenes controversy that kept COYOTE VS. ACME from screens for several years, let me quickly fill you in.

COYOTE VS. ACME was filmed and finished back in 2023. But instead of releasing the film, giving it a chance to recoup its budget and find new and old Looney Tunes fans back in the cinema, Warner Bros. decided to "shelve" the film for a tax write-off. They would have gotten a $30 million tax loss claim, according to DEADLINE.

(By the way, as of this writing on September 12th, 2026, the film has grossed $41.5 million according to BOX OFFICE MOJO. Go to the cinema!)

Filmmakers and audiences made their voices heard, and Warner Bros. released the film to the filmmakers for them to try and release it on their own. The bidding war began, because who can turn down this kind of publicity, right?

Finally, in 2025, the film was picked up by Ketchup Entertainment for $50 million and the road to release was re-opened, which is how I got to see COYOTE VS. ACME in theaters last week.

Now, I can't help but notice that the plot behind COYOTE VS. ACME is about the little guy fighting the big guy in order to win. Was that how this film came to be? The little guy filmmakers and tiny creatives fought mega studio Warner Bros. to release their passion project in order to win in the theaters!

But...

My cynical brain is working here.

Did Warner Bros. anticipate all this and use the controversy to drum up this publicity to make sure audiences would show up in the theater?

No... right? The little guy did win this round?

Or are we, the audience, just playing our part in being experimented on and mined and will be for the rest of our lives? Make the movie's release controversial so people will want to go and see it! This is a tale as old as time, as I will explore in my future blog posts on reboots, rehashes, and reheats.

Taking off my cynical hat now. I think the most important thing to take from both of these films is their unifying message. We have lost our sense of empathy, and we so desperately need it back if we're going to survive 2026 and beyond.

Thanks for reading! Would love to know your thoughts in the comments. And stay tuned for more posts as I will be formally launching my newsletter/blog with first a deep dive into the four A STAR IS BORN films in the coming weeks.

Oh, and also... GO TO THE MOVIE THEATER!

Resources:
-- "Steven Spielberg and Disclosure Day" by David Hudson of THE CRITERION COLLECTION, June 10, 2026
-- "'Coyote Vs. Acme': Warner Bros Shelves Finished Live-Action/Animated Pic Completely As Studio Takes $30M Tax Write-Off" by Anthony D'Alessandro of DEADLINE, November 9, 2023
-- "DISCLOSURE DAY is Great. But Spielberg Overestimates Our Capacity for Empathy" by Isabella Silvers of THE GUARDIAN, June 17, 2026