How the Looney Tunes movie missed the chance to make it to the big screen

The day the earth exploded: AND The Looney Tunes moviethe first fully animated film based on the Looney Tunes characters, which hit US theaters on December 13th, almost didn’t happen. Several times.

“At least three, four times during production I waited for that phone call (to close the film),” says director Peter Browngardt. “It’s been a tough journey.”

That’s putting it mildly. Browngardt was hired to produce and direct in mid-2021 The day the earth exploded as his feature film debut. Browngardt was a writer for the popular and acclaimed HBO Max Looney Tunes reboot, a series of new original shorts featuring classic Tunes characters that seem to prove there’s an audience for more Looney tunes. Browngardt and his writing team — about 15 writers and story consultants are credited for the film — came up with an original idea involving Daffy Duck and Porky Pig uncovering a secret alien plot to take over Earth via mind-control chewing gum. Two legendary characters must save the planet without driving each other crazy.

The day the earth exploded it was planned as an original film for Max, but, like many WB projects – see Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme — fell victim to a restructuring after Warner Bros. and Discovery merged in early 2022. Warner allowed the producers to sell it to independent buyers. Following its world premiere at the Annecy Animated Film Festival this year, Ketchup Entertainment, an independent distributor not known for its children’s programming (previous releases include Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Robert Rodriguez’ Hypnotic), usurped domestic rights. The film will qualify for the Oscars on December 13, before hitting 1,500 screens in February.

In a broad conversation with The Hollywood ReporterBrowngardt recounts the battles, through corporate mergers, budget cuts, strikes and pandemics, to The day the earth exploded on the big screen.

This whole project has had such a crazy production history, it started as a series for Max, then became a feature film, then got shelved, then came back. Was there a time when you despaired that this movie would become, I don’t know, the next one Batgirl and be completely cancelled?

About three different times, probably four different times during production, I waited for that phone call (to close the film). It was a difficult journey. Basically, we got the green light for Max and then the merger with Discovery happened so Warner Brothers was deep in debt and they started canceling a lot of projects. But we have a very modest budget for a feature film, about $15 million, so we were last on the list. They went for the big stuff first and kept going down, cutting and cutting. But because we were small enough, we got permission to continue production. I think they also liked what they saw. Then we got permission to try to sell the film outside of the studio, so we shopped it around (to other streaming services), but no one wanted it.

It was a time when there was a lot of fear about the future of streaming so people weren’t spending. Warner Bros. International was briefly interested in distributing the film (outside the US), but then the strike happened and that kind of kicked us out because they were focusing on Dina: part 2 and their other big tentpole films. They needed marketing for that, so they passed. We had to go out. We bought it like you would any independent film at a festival. This British company, GFM Animation, made some international sales, but Ketchup Entertainment saved us. If we didn’t get domestic distribution, it would be over. They were at the screening in Annecy, which went incredibly well, we got a great response and a lot of press for it. And they fully stood behind it. It’s wonderful that it will be released in February on 1,500 screens. We basically made an independent film through Warner Brothers. How surreal is that?

It is bizarre that the first fully animated Looney Tunes film is released independently, and not through Warner Bros.

Yes, there used to be compilation movies, for example Daffy Duck Movie: Fantastic Island (1983) or Bugs Bunny/Road Runner movie (1979) where they combine old classic shorts. And there are also (live action/animation) Space Jam thing, which is basically a sneaker commercial. But this is the first original, fully animated movie featuring Looney Tunes characters. It’s crazy to think that they’ve been around for 80+ years without being used before. I think you could make a number of movies with these classic animated characters — Bugs, Daffy, and even Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Stupid movie (1995) was a great inspiration for us.

Why did you choose Daffy Duck and Porky Pig for this film and not, say, Bugs Bunny, who would have done better at the box office?

We chose Porky and Daffy specifically because, for example, they don’t always want to kill each other. Most of the other Looney Tunes characters are always trying to kill each other, hunting wabbits and whatnot. But we knew we had to make an emotional story. As much as we love writing jokes, we knew we had to really dig in and find a story that would keep the audience engaged for 90 minutes. Keeping with the Looney Tunes style, we had to define them and their relationship and take them through the steps. But I didn’t want to change them. At the end of the movie, it’s still Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. They had experiences and maybe learned something about each other, but they are still the same characters.

You also stayed true to the animation style. The movie looks very old school Looney Tunes.

My point was: you can’t redesign Looney Tunes. Just keep making them. They tried to redesign them in the past and it was stupid. Something like Looney Tunes, which works so perfectly, those character archetypes, the style, and everything is like winning the lottery. Don’t mess with it. Stick with it and just perfect, perfect, perfect. I mean, they are the greatest cartoon characters of all time. These shorts are probably the best comedy shorts ever made on film, starring Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

But Looney Tunes had 40 years with classic directors and they played a lot with style in the old shorts, with more graphic backgrounds, more lush backgrounds. Even with the characters, you could always see the hand of the director or animator in the design. It was never a rigid copy and paste model, it was very organic.

We did a lot of homework for the film. Every Looney Tune is short for me. There are 1030 or so of them, and not all of them are available, but there are people who have ways to get them, get copies. I wanted them as Quick Time videos on our servers for this project so we can all reference them. It was like having an instruction manual at your fingertips. We had a lot of crew meetings where we watched short films, studied them, dissected the characters, how they move and how they speak.

But we also drew inspiration from other films. We talked a lot about Stupid and stupider and Borat. Or like movies Moron with Steve Martin: Comedy films with strong, iconic characters who have an emotional streak but don’t really change.

There are many screenwriters responsible for this film. Was it more of a writers’ room arrangement, like with a TV show?

I get this question a lot. So I worked with the screenwriter, Kevin Costello, on an early draft. But then Kevin, myself and Alex (Kirwan) and a few other crew shot the whole movie via Zoom during the pandemic. We would do 3-4 hours of talking, walking through the entire film, thinking about sequences and then dropping them. Every animated film I’ve ever made in my career has outlines and some kind of rough beats, not a script because I feel that telling the script is part of the writing. When you do caricature, you are writing and drawing at the same time. love it That’s why I got into television animation in the first place. I find cartoon humor at its best, and Looney Tunes humor comes from cartoonists writing the material. So Kevin wrote a great first draft and there’s some stuff in there that’s still in the movie, but with the exception of Darrick (Bachman), who’s the actual screenwriter, who came in later to load some stuff, everyone else is a storyboard artist-writer. I fought with the studio to collect all the credit for them. The studio hates to do this, but we’re writers. We write the words that come out of this animated mouth. We write every action they take. This happens on all animated features. If you compare the original screenplay that sells the movie, s Shrek or any of these things, is reinvented four or five times, almost from scratch, before the final version. One of the things I’m most proud of with this film is that I was able to give people the credit they deserved. I wish animators could get into the WGA, but that’s a whole other battle.

I said the movie has an old school Looney Tunes feel, but it also has a lot of referential humor, breaking the fourth wall, and so on, which reminds me of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network movies.

Right. I think it’s just in our DNA now. We can no longer write the exact tonally correct jokes for 1945. When I was at Cal Arts, we had a great guest speaker, director and animator, who said, “Don’t worry about always being original. Just be yourself and invest yourself in what you do, and the originality and tone will come to the fore.” And my tone and humor is definitely Cartoon Network and SpongeBob and all that stuff, that’s in there, but that’s also true for everyone who worked on the team. I think Warner Bros Animation only made one movie before that, Teen Titans (2018). Teen Titans Go! To the movies). None of us, or almost none of us, had worked in features before. We approached it like we were doing an 11-minute cartoon for Cartoon Network. We worked very quickly, very quickly and cheaply. This is the style of humor of our generation. I didn’t have any hard and fast rules. If it was a good joke and it’s contemporary – like our ride-sharing joke in the movie or our coffee joke – but it made us laugh, then it stayed with us.

This movie ends with a nod to a potential sequel. What are the chances of that? Do you still have (Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David) Zaslav’s number on speed dial?

I wouldn’t hold your breath. But that’s above my pay grade. I left the studio in February, literally, the day I approved the final cut of the film was my last day at Warner Brothers. So I don’t know what the future is with Looney Tunes, with that company or that world. But I think if you put these characters in the right hands, it will have a great future. I had a wonderful, wonderful experience making this film. And I feel like you could make a Looney Tunes movie out of any of those properties. The only obstacle, which I discovered when I was in some test groups for the Looney Tunes Shorts program, was that a lot of kids don’t know who Daffy Duck is. Disney has always been good at keeping Mickey Mouse in the center of the younger generation, that’s why they have their preschool show and those different levels of Mickey shows. Warner Brothers didn’t do that with Looney Tunes. And I think that was a mistake because, in my opinion, the Looney Tunes are much better characters.