Report: Warner Bros. Plans To Relaunch Looney Tunes Theatrically In 2028
Warner Bros. has a plan to bring its Looney Tunes stable back to the theatrical format beginning in 2028, according to a new report by Matthew Belloni in the Puck newsletter.
Belloni’s report focused on “non-core assets” that Warner Bros. Discovery might sell to help shore up the company’s finances and reduce its debt load. According to the report, selling the Looney Tunes characters remains an option though the likelihood of such a sale is low.
The evidence that currently suggests WBD isn’t planning to sell the Looney Tunes characters is that Warner Bros. Pictures Animation, under the leadership of Bill Damaschke, has a “plan for the property that will begin to roll out in 2028,” per the report.
Belloni also revealed that former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes had explored selling Looney Tunes to The Walt Disney Company. That would have been before Time Warner was sold to AT&T in 2018, and even longer before David Zaslav’s Discovery bought the company from AT&T in 2022.
Amid’s Take: It’s incredibly difficult to envision how WBD might resurrect the Looney Tunes franchise in theatrical form, as long as the company is being led by Zaslav. WBD’s current approach to these prized characters is utterly incomprehensible as the company has recently produced two Looney Tunes films and chosen to release neither of them.
Distribution of its hand-drawn The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie was farmed out to the European distribution company GFM Animation, which in turn sold the film to a no-name American distributor called Ketchup Entertainment, a low-wattage firm that doesn’t appear to possess the marketing or advertising capability to launch a major film starring iconic WB characters. And then there’s the hybrid Coyote vs. Acme, which the company has shelved for absolutely no good reason and currently seem to has no intention of releasing.
The irony is that these two films are among the best long-form examples of Looney Tunes entertainment ever committed to film. The fact that they’ve made two exemplar titles with these iconic characters and decided to release neither of them through Warner Bros. is a clear indication that the Zaslav regime is beyond clueless of what the brand is about or what to do with the characters. Why do Looney Tunes need to be “relaunched” when they’re already making great films with the characters and then not releasing them? Even by Hollywood standards, it’s a business decision that doesn’t make any sense.
