TheLooney Tunescharacters have been entertaining people for nearly a century now. They’re beloved institutions that everyone around the world recognizes. Also, they’ve been tremendously difficult to translate to the big screen. On paper, through the eyes of studio executives and marketers, it should be easy to makeBugs Bunnyas big as the Minions on the silver screen. After all, Bugs Bunny is a beloved character, ditto Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird, and countless other Looney Tunes fixtures. Put them in a movie, audiences should come out in droves. However, it’s been tough to get moviegoers excited about seeing characters who are in their element in eight-minute shorts try to sustain a short film.
These animated icons also have trouble deftly balancing their legacy a perceived “need” to cater to modern sensibilities. Hence why projects likeSpace Jam: A New Legacystrain to be “hip” while also indulging in fan service for Looney Tunes geeks…and then end up satisfying nobody. If you think the track record of released Looney Tunes movies is rough, though, you should see the legacy of unmade Looney Tunes movies. Throughout the years, Warner Bros. has constantly tried to launch the Looney Tunes characters as movie stars, only for these efforts to go down in flames, like Wile E. Coyote on a rocket. Grab your gear for Rabbit Season (or is it Duck Season?) and hold your Marvin the Martian plushies close…it’s time to delve into the world of unrealized Looney Tunes movies.
Space Jam 2 / Space Jam: A New Legacy
A rogue artificial intelligence kidnaps the son of famed basketball player LeBron James, who then has to work with Bugs Bunny to win a basketball game.
Why Was ‘Space Jam 2’ So Hard To Make?
In 1996, the Looney Tunes characters got a new jolt of life through the hit movieSpace Jam. While Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck had previously headlined theatrical movies likeThe Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Moviethat were comprised of their classic cartoons (with some new animation sprinkled in to provide the connective tissue between the shorts), Space Jam was the first thoroughly original feature-length movie these characters had headlined. With the box office numbers of thisMichael Jordanstar vehicle going wild and merchandise sales being equally profound, a sequel was inevitable. Initially,Warner Bros. was excited about this project, but once it became clear that Jordan didn’t want to star inanother Space Jam installment, this follow-up went on the back burner.
Afterward, Warner Bros. brasskept on pitching ideas on how to do aSpace Jamfollow-up, including through prospective projects involving everyone fromJackie ChantoTiger Woods. The genesis of all these projects was to pair up the Looney Tunes with another live-action icon, though none of them came to fruition. Eventually, these animated legends returned to the silver screen withLooney Tunes: Back in Action,a Joe Dante directorial effort that flopped badly enough to ensure that the Looney Tunes characters wouldn’t be headlining any new movies soon.Still, you can’t keep marketable, er, famous fictional figures down for long, and by the end of the decade, Warner Bros. had a new idea for how to turn its most famous animated individuals into movie stars.
How Did ‘Alvin and the Chipmunks’ Influence Looney Tunes Projects?
2007’sAlvin and the Chipmunkscame out of nowhere and shocked the world with a $210+ million domestic box office haul. It was a tremendous feat that, to Hollywood executives everywhere, suggested that a new way to print money was to take vintage animated cartoon characters and put them into sassy live-action comedies. In July 2008, just seven months after that Chipmunks movie lorded over the box office,Warner Bros. and Alcon Entertainment announced a live-action Marvin the Martian movie. In the past, Looney Tunes movies were planned as ensemble efforts headlined by Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. Now, Warner Bros. was going for a divide-and-conquer approach.Marvin the Martian would be the first of these characters to get a solo movie seemingly modeled afterAlvin and the Chipmunks.
15 Best Looney Tunes Characters, Ranked By How Funny Their Mistakes Are
That’s all folks!
In the years that followed, a slew of similar projects were announced,including movies based on Speedy Gonzales, another focused on Bugs Bunny, and yet another endeavor concentrating on Pepe Le Pew. One bizarre shared element across several of these projects was the presence ofMike Myers. The comedic legend was reported to be voicing Marvin the Martian in his live-action movie at the end of 2009, whileMyers was also attached to lend his pipes to Pepe Le Pewin October 2010. Celebrity voice-overs are incredibly common in American animation, but it’s strange to see a studio leaning on one leading man so heavily.Audiences never got to process multiple Looney Tunes characters speaking in the voice of the Guru Pitka, though. None of these projects ever got off the ground. It’s already a challenge trying to cook up feature-length narratives for an ensemble cast of Looney Tunes characters to inhabit. Conjuring up solo movies focusing on just one of these figures must’ve been a nightmare. Plus, the box office results forAlvin and the Chipmunksknock-offs likeG-ForceandYogi Bearleft a lot to be desired. It was back to the drawing board for the Looney Tunes.
All the Unmade Looney Tunes Movies We Never Got
In August 2012,Warner Bros. revealed that a new live-action/CGI Looney Tunes movie(this time focusing on a slew of characters from this franchise rather than just Michigan J. Frog or Beaky Buzzard) was in development penned byJenny Slate. The studio had put a lot of high-profile producers on this project, includingHarry PotterproducerDavid Heymanand horror authorSeth Grahame-Smith, the latter of whom was attached to a slew of early 2010s Warner Bros. genre features. The studio clearly hoped that connecting so many big names to this motion picture would finally give it a new Looney Tunes blockbuster, but there was never any further momentum on this project.Slate would later reveal in 2020that this project was the first-ever screenwriting job she ever secured and that she had a life-long love for animation, including the Looney Tunes characters. She also noted that she couldn’t remember what the plot of the proposed motion picture was,making it a lost chapter in the history of unmade Looney Tunes movies.
For much of the 2010s, Warner Bros. tabled further plans for brand-new Looney Tunes movies, mostly because in2014 the studio announced it was committing to a newSpace Jamsequelheadlined byLeBron James. This high-profile production connected to the one lucrative theatrical Looney Tunes movie pushed any other Looney Tunes titles off to the side. Still, that didn’t mean the studio was totally abandoning any additional Looney Tunes movie plans. In 2016, thestudio announced thatEugenio Derbezwould be voicing Speedy Gonzalesin a new animated film focused on the Looney Tunes character. The proposed project would be called Speedy, functioned as an origin story for the heroic mouse, and even had the potential to be screened in Spanish-language screenings in the U.S. Given both the popularity of Gonzales as a character and the enduring box office appeal of Derbez,this particular Looney Tunes movie seemed especially likely to see the light of day.However, there were never any further updates on the production.
Time and time again Warner Bros. has attempted to turn the Looney Tunes into big movie stars only to struggle to get these projects off the ground. The enduring appeal and fame of Bugs Bunny and friends has made them seem like ample fodder for movie stardom, but feature films just aren’t where they thrive. Inevitably, writers tasked with cracking these films end up struggling to figure out proper narratives for Daffy Duck or Porky Pig that can sustain the interest of moviegoers. The Looney Tunes characters are so cursed as movie stars that even completed films starring these cartoon icons face enormous challenges. Just look at thesaga ofCoyote vs. Acme, a Wile E. Coyote moviethat was fully finished when Warner Bros. opted to shelve it for a tax break. Though the studio reversed course on this decision, this tremendously controversial move, not to mention the endless string of unrealized movies starring these animated figures,speaks to how much trouble it is getting the Looney Tunes to be big-screen attractions.
Space Jam: A New Legacyis available on Max in the U.S.
