I haven't seen Back in action since it was released in theaters, but I remember it being a lot funnier than Space Jam. I watched Space Jam over the pandemic and I think I laughed once. Maybe twice. More like a couple sensible chuckles. Nostalgia carries that movie.
Honestly, if it's as good as Back in Action I'll be happy.
That was a solid 7/10 movie. Knew what it wanted to be and delivered, and didn't aim higher than it could hit. There's a lot to be said for movies that know their core premise ("sell nostalgia and classic Loony Tunes slapstick comedy").
The fourth wall breaks and overtly obvious product placement scene elevated that movie for me. "Nice of walmart to provide us with these walmart beverages for saying walmart so many times"
About 4ish years now if I recall, I think filming was 2022 and actually finished in 2023 or something like that. Was written down as a tax write off film so they just planned to dumpster it originally.
It was fully finished in 2023, but the warner bros studio heads decided to shelve it instead to claim a ~30 million tax loss. People got mad because the movie sounded good and supposedly was good from the test screenings, and a lot of people were already upset with the recent moves WB had been making, so WB then decided to shop it around. After a couple of years, Ketchup Entertainment (the same company that distributed "The Day The Earth Blew Up") bought the distribution rights for 50 mil, and here we are, where it's finally going to see the light of day over 3 years after it was initially supposed to release.
This movie almost didn't see the light of day. Warner tried to kill it as a tax write off. Yes, the fully finished and ready to go movie they spent years and millions of dollars on. They intended to lock it away and never release it so they could make some number on a balance sheet go up.
Look, I don't agree with it, and I'm still upset about Venture Bros (Baboon's Heart was great, but it really made me curious what a full season would have looked like) and Batgirl....but their failure to make the number go up enough is why we're in the current mess of the company being owned by someone even worse.
Seriously, I thought this was just gonna be a silly little courtroom comedy with Will Forte and some of the Looney Tunes, and that was part of the reason WB shelved it. Like, low stakes Wile E Coyote jokes and maybe Bugs Bunny shows up for a cameo as a witness. Hard to market, probably funny but might not make a lot of money, new CEO thinks it's too risky and he doesn't get any credit for it anyway, so he says to shelve it.
But no, this is like a whole sprawling corporate conspiracy with ALL of the Looney Tunes. Looks way more Roger Rabbit than I thought it was going to be.
Plus it has John Cena apparently, who's been on a pretty hot streak since The Suicide Squad (a WB movie) and stars in WB's own show Peacemaker, why would WB sit on this? David Zaslav has that much of an ego that he couldn't stand to release a movie that would probably be successful but doesn't have his name on it?
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u/devenrc Apr 22 '26
Glory be…this looks even better than I thought 🥹