Coyote vs. Acme Enters Oscar Race at No. 9, Wildwood Holds the Lead

Three days after the Academy ruled it eligible, Coyote vs. Acme has landed at No. 9 on the combined Best Animated Feature leaderboard, with 5.5% odds and, for now, no listed position among the experts' own rankings. Gold Derby broke the eligibility news on Tuesday: the Ketchup Entertainment-acquired Warner Bros. cast-off will compete for the statuette at the 2027 Oscar ceremony.

The speed is the story. A film shelved by one studio and rescued by another now sits inside the Top 10 of the combined chart, which aggregates users, editors and expert prognosticators. It aims to become only the second live-action/animated hybrid nominated in the category, after 2021's Marcel the Shell with Shoes On put its stop-motion hero into our world.

The credentials are not trivial. The Looney Tunes comedy carries a 96% Fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes and $123 million at the global box office — roughly one chart position bought with receipts and reviews rather than sentiment. That financial heft matters as smaller, less commercially successful titles rise or fall while more Academy voters sample them.

Who actually believes in the coyote?

Not everyone, it turns out. The early enthusiasm is confined largely to Gold Derby users and editors, both of whom place the film in their Top 10. The expert prognosticators either remain unconvinced about Wile E. Coyote's Oscar potential or have simply been slow to update their rankings since the ruling. In the experts' table, Coyote vs. Acme appears at No. 10 with no odds assigned at all — a holding pattern, not a verdict.

What does the split over Ray Gunn change?

The broader divide in the race concerns Brad Bird's Ray Gunn. Experts rank the retro-future noir at No. 4 with 71.4% odds, and a significant share of that group has seen the Netflix release at festival playdates or advance screenings. Users place it sixth, at 48.7% on the combined chart.

The beneficiary is Tangles. The Canadian-made title holds the No. 5 slot among users at 57.6% combined odds — precisely the placement Ray Gunn is gunning for.

Can anything catch Wildwood?

One point of agreement: Laika's Wildwood stays top dog. The stop-motion epic leads the combined chart at 97.8%, having slightly widened its advantage over Toy Story 5 (95.8%) after audiences saw its artistry firsthand. Its Best Picture odds have also ticked upward in recent days on the strength of enthusiastic reactions.

The experts are more cautious. Among that group, Wildwood remains deadlocked at No. 1 with Toy Story 5, both at 100.0% — a tie the film's opening weekend, which produced no Lord of the Rings-sized grosses, has not yet broken.

The chasing pack on the combined chart: Hoppers at 79.2%, Iron Boy at 69.6%, then Tangles, Ray Gunn, Forgotten Island at 18.4%, Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom at 12.5%, Coyote vs. Acme at 5.5%, and Minions and Monsters at 3.4%.

An Oscar night field containing Woody and Buzz, Prue and Curtis, and Wile E. Coyote would be plenty explosive. For now, the coyote is simply in the hunt — No. 9, unpriced by the experts, and rising.