In The Day The Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig’s home gets totally, utterly destroyed by an alien invasion. It feels like a weirdly metatextual moment, even for a franchise known for frequently shattering the fourth wall. It’s been widely publicized that the Looney Tunes’ longtime home at Warner Bros. has been slowly and systematically ... well, not quite “destroyed,” but certainly not given foundational support. There’s a reason that The Day The Earth Blew Up is being released in theaters this week by Ketchup Entertainment, which acquired the distribution rights from Warner Bros. after the film had been kept in limbo for more than three years. The Looney Tunes, once such a pillar of the studio that Bugs Bunny was an integral part of the Warner Bros. logo, could no longer reliably call Warner their home.
Since 2022, current Warner Bros. Discovery head David Zaszlav has been slashing budgets across all brands — and none have taken a harder hit than animation. But it was still shocking to see a legacy franchise like Looney Tunes take a beating, with hundreds of classic shorts like Duck Amuck quietly taken off the Max streaming service (before being added back on after outcry), and project after project getting canceled. The worst part came when fully completed feature films like The Day the Earth Blew Up and Coyote vs. Acme got unceremoniously canned — the former to apparently appease stockholders, the latter for a tax write-off. But no matter how many cartoonishly big mallets to the head the Looney Tunes might take, they’ll always come crawling back — and The Day the Earth Blew Up is perfect, wildly entertaining, proof of that.
