Looney Tunes Is Making a Comeback, but It’s Not All at Warner Bros.

“Looney Tunes” is back on top. But its success doesn’t belong solely to Warner Bros. any longer.

The 2020s have been a turbulent time for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig and the whole “Merrie Melodies” gang. A changing WB regime sparked the cancellation or shelving of multiple “Looney Tunes” films. A decades-later follow-up to “Space Jam” garnered poor reviews and a COVID-affected disappointing box office return in 2021. In March, WB’s streaming service (then named Max), removed the classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons.

Yet the Warner Bros.-owned franchise evokes the spirit of the characters it portrays — unkillable and enduring. In late October, news broke that the classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons cracked the top 10 series on Fox’s Tubi, a free streaming service with a robust library. Tubi confirmed that it continued to rank in the top 10 in the fourth quarter.

Meanwhile, a slate of theatrical releases from Warner Bros. and beyond, as well as planned revivals of the franchise in 2026, make one thing clear: the “Tunes” are here to stay, even if they are bouncing between homes as their corporate owner licenses them out.

The endurance of this decades-old franchise proves that it has continued value, one that keeps Bugs Bunny a household name for children across generations. By remaining popular — and thus, lucrative —  across homes like Tubi, Warner Bros. and more, “Looney Tunes” has proven that it’s a brand worth preserving, both culturally and financially. 

“Looney Tunes” is certainly a money-maker. According to Parrot Analytics, the franchise has generated more than $300 million in global subscriber revenue from the first quarter of 2020 to the second quarter of 2025, with $250 million of this coming from HBO Max, raising the question of why it left WBD’s streaming service in the first place.

Several insiders at WBD confirmed the studio’s lasting commitment to the “Looney Tunes” gang — a commitment that should become clearer in coming years.

“I’ve been around some 15 years at the studio, and the Tunes have always been core,” a Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson said. “It’s part of the legacy and part of the current … It’s going to be a big part of the future.”

Tubi’s “Newstalgic” top 10

The “Looney Tunes’” Tubi move came in August, five months after the classic series’ departure from HBO Max as Warner Bros. opted to license the IP out to the free streaming platform. It wouldn’t take long for it to regain its footing. In the fourth quarter, the show landed in the 10 most-streamed shows on the service by viewing time — something Tubi representatives called “no small feat.”

“At Tubi, we’re very much focused on what we see audiences engage with and giving them more. Candidly, we see a lot of positive signals around classic cinema, Black entertainment, classic animation, nostalgia,” said Tubi head of acquisitions Sam Harowitz. “We’re driving toward what we believe fans will engage with.”

Tubi’s commitment to classic film and animation stems from a belief in “newstalgia” (a term Harowitz said he adopted from WB). What was once old finds new life as younger generations discover properties from before their time. Harowitz said that “Looney Tunes” carries an everlasting appeal, one that speaks to younger audiences (including his own children) through numerous iconic characters.

“There are a ton of viewers and fans who come to Tubi and engage with ‘Looney Tunes’ for a multitude of reasons, and I think our job is to make that nostalgia accessible, to make those cartoons accessible to the broadest possible audience.”

Harowitz pointed to a “long, storied history” of classic animation streaming on the platform to multi-generational audiences, offering series from such franchises as “The Flintstones,” “Scooby-Doo,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Tom and Jerry” and more. Warner Bros. is but one of more than 400 content partners Harowitz cited for Tubi, though he did note a long-running relationship between the free service and WBD. DC films, HBO shows and other series removed from HBO Max can also be found on Tubi.

Harowitz credited this partnership with the addition of “Looney Tunes” to the service, as Tubi employees noticed that the series had been removed from HBO Max without having a new home. The head of acquisitions called this pickup “a bit of a different one” compared to other WBD programs, as “over the years they’ve been really great at identifying upcoming opportunities.”

“When we noticed that ‘Looney Tunes’ was no longer available, we actually reached out to Warner Bros. over the summer,” he said. “We had some of the more recent shows, like ‘The Looney Tunes Show,’ so we reached out about ‘Merrie Melodies’ because we felt like we had the right directional signals.”

What’s up, Zas?

So why did HBO Max remove “Looney Tunes” in the first place? The move came amid a shifting content strategy — a recurring issue that has rattled several projects starring the “Merrie Melodies” gang in the first half of this decade.

When HBO Max rebranded, the move wasn’t as simple as putting the letters “HBO” back in the name. It meant a reconfiguring of Warner’s aggressive foray into the streaming enterprise. One of the things that didn’t work, according to insiders, was children’s programming (“Sesame Street” famously met a similar fate to “Looney Tunes”).

But the removal of the “Looney Tunes” flagship series wasn’t the only change at WBD that affected the franchise. In the early 2020s, three distinct “Looney Tunes” films were, at least temporarily, scrapped and written off amid a period of heavy financial scrutiny following the completion of the Warner and Discovery merger.

One such film was Pete Browngardt’s “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” a feature-length Daffy Duck/Porky Pig adventure riffing on sci-fi B-movies, intended to release on HBO Max and Cartoon Network. But “The Day the Earth Blew Up” was shopped out to other networks in 2022 in a move that similarly rocked series and specials like “Batman: Caped Crusader” and “Merry Little Batman.”

“The Day the Earth Blew Up” was eventually saved, with Ketchup Entertainment picking up the nearly-completed project and releasing it in theaters in early 2025. The film became the first “Looney Tunes” original theatrical feature to not be distributed by WB (prior to this, the “Looney Tunes” compilation film “Bugs Bunny: Superstar” was distributed by United Artists in 1975).

“Bye Bye Bunny” wasn’t quite so lucky. The film, also intended for non-theatrical release, was meant to be the first-ever feature-length “Looney Tunes” musical, one starring Bugs Bunny as he returns to his roots after a life on Broadway. 

Directed by Brandon Jeffords and written by Ariel Dumas, the film was still in early days when the content adjustments hit. Production was canceled, and “Bye Bye Bunny” was put on ice indefinitely. According to a person close to Warner Bros. Animation, “Bye Bye Bunny” remains “not in active development, but WBA may choose to revisit at a later time.”

And then there’s “Coyote vs. Acme,” the oft-reported-upon theatrical film that was swept away in a tax write-off strategy. The live-action/animation hybrid was a modern construction, one that looks at the zany cartoons of yesteryear through a self-referential lens, directed by Dave Green and written by the now-Oscar-nominated Samy Burch.

A spokesperson for the Motion Picture Group said that “Coyote vs. Acme,” like “The Day the Earth Blew Up” and “Bye Bye Bunny,” was initially intended for streaming release rather than theatrical, and thus failed to fit into the David Zaslav regime. After more than a year of uncertainty, the already-completed film was acquired for theatrical release by Ketchup Entertainment just weeks after the release of “The Day the Earth Blew Up,” and is set to come out in 2026.

Back in action

Following these regime-change cancellations, the removal of classic “Looney Tunes” cartoons felt like a nail in the coffin for some fans of the franchise. While HBO Max must pay for the licensing of these cartoons like any other service, their unceremonious removal was seen as a signal that WB was washing its hands of one of its most enduring franchises.

But apparently, that’s not the case. A WBD spokesperson pointed to a few ways that fans will see the “Looney Tunes” creep back into the fold. This year will mark both the 30th anniversary of “Space Jam” and, tied to the Winter Olympics, the “Tunes” are set to appear in a series of shorts dedicated to various wintertime athletic events.

“Newstalgia” rubbed off on the “Tunes” as well, with the spokesperson citing more than 128 billion minutes of watched “Looney Tunes” content on digital platforms. According to them, WBD cares less about where people watch the “Tunes” than they do about people watching them in the first place — making licenses from sources like Tubi and Ketchup Entertainment valuable propositions.

“It’s still ‘Looney Tunes’ — it’s still our franchise and our fans’ beloved IP,” the spokesperson said. “From where we stand, the various ways audiences can choose to enjoy and engage with our content helps to keep our characters alive.” 

“Everywhere our content appears provides more opportunities for new audiences to discover it and for longtime fans to reconnect,” the spokesperson continued. “That enthusiasm fuels everything — consumer products, theme parks and the desire to keep watching. It’s a win all around.”

WBD still has at least one more “Looney Tunes”-related trick up its sleeve — a new animated theatrical feature set to release in the coming years. WBD did not respond to questions about the plot of said “super-secret” feature.

As a new merger looms over WBD and the Warner catalog will once again switch hands, hopefully this next “Looney Tunes” film is as durable as Wile E. Coyote.

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