From the Brink to the Big Screen: How the Looney Tunes Film Defied the Odds
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, the first-ever fully animated film based on the Looney Tunes characters, which hit U.S. theaters Dec. 13, almost didn’t happen. Several times.
“At least three, four times during the production I was waiting for that phone call [to shut down the movie],” says director Peter Browngardt. “It was a rocky journey.”
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That’s putting it mildly. Browngardt was brought on in mid-2021 to produce and direct The Day the Earth Blew Up as his feature debut. Browngardt was a writer on the popular, and critically acclaimed, HBO Max Looney Tunes reboot, a series of new original shorts featuring the classic Tunes characters which seemed to prove there was an audience out there for more Looney. Browngardt and his writing team — some 15 writers and story consultants are credited on the movie — came up with an original idea involving Daffy Duck and Porky Pig uncovering a secret alien plot to take over the Earth via mind-control bubblegum. The two iconic characters have to save the planet without driving each other insane.
The Day the Earth Blew Up was planned as an original movie for Max but, like many WB projects — see Batgirl and Coyote vs. Acme — fell prey to restructuring following Warner Bros. merger with Discovery in early 2022. Warner allowed the producers to shop it around to independent buyers. After its world premiere at the Annecy Animation Film Festival this year, Ketchup Entertainment, an indie distributor not known for its kids’ programming (previous releases include Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Robert Rodriguez’ Hypnotic), snatched up domestic rights. The film will get an Oscar-qualifying run on December 13, before its 1,500-screen bow in February.
In a wide-ranging conversation with The Hollywood Reporter, Browngardt recounts the battles, through corporate mergers, budget cuts, strikes and a pandemic, to get The Day the Earth Blew Up on the big screen.
This whole project had such a crazy production history, starting as a series for Max, then becoming a feature film, then being shelved, then coming back. Was there a time when you despaired that this film was going to become, I don’t know, the next Batgirl and be canceled altogether?
About three different times, possibly four different times during production, I was waiting for that phone call [to shut down the movie]. It was a rocky journey. Basically we got greenlit for Max and then there was the merger with Discovery so Warner Brothers is deep in debt and they start cutting a lot of projects. But we have a very modest budget for a feature film, about $15 million, so we were the last ones on the list. They went for the big stuff first and kept coming down, cutting and cutting. But because we were small enough, we got permission to keep in production. I think they also liked what they were seeing. Then we got permission to try to sell the film outside the studio, so we shopped it around [to other streaming services] but no one wanted it.
It was that time when there was a lot of fear about the future of streaming so people were not spending. Warner Bros. International was briefly interested in distributing the film [outside the U.S.] but then the strike happened and that kind of pushed us out because they were focusing on Dune: Part 2 and their other big tentpole movies. They needed the marketing for that, so they passed. We had to go outside. We shopped it like you’d shop any indie feature at a festival. This British company, GFM Animation, did some international sales but it was Ketchup Entertainment that saved us. If we hadn’t gotten domestic distribution, it would have been over. They were at the Annecy screening, which went incredibly well, we got a great response and great press from that. And they got fully behind it. It’s wonderful that it’s going to come out 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-ever fully-animated Looney Tunes movie is being released independently and not through Warner Bros.
Yeah, there have been compilation movies before, like Daffy Duck’s Movie: Fantastic Island (1983) or the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie (1979) where they stitch together old classic shorts. And then there are the [live-action/animation features] Space Jam stuff, which is basically a sneaker commercial. But this is the first original, fully animated film with Looney Tunes characters. It’s crazy to think that they’ve been around for 80-plus years, and they haven’t been used before. I think you could make a number of movies with these classic animated characters — the Bugs, the Daffys, and even the Mickey Mouses and Goofys. A Goofy Movie (1995) was a big inspiration for us.
Why did you go for Daffy Duck and Porky Pig for this feature and not, say, Bugs Bunny, who would seem to be more box office?
We picked Porky and Daffy particularly because, for one, they don’t always want to kill each other. Most of the other Looney Tunes characters are always trying to murder each other, hunting wabbits and whatnot. But we knew we had to do an emotional story. As much as we love to write jokes, we knew we had to really dig in and find a story to hold an audience for 90 minutes. Keeping the Looney Tunes style, we had to define them and their relationship and put them through the paces. But I didn’t want to change them. At the end of the movie, it’s still Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. They’ve had an experience and maybe learned something about each other, but they are still the same characters.
You also stayed true to the animation style. The film looks very old-school Looney Tunes.
My thing was: You don’t redesign Looney Tunes. You just keep making them. They’ve tried to redesign them in the past and it’s a fool’s errand. Something like Looney Tunes, that works so perfectly, these character archetypes, the style, and everything is like winning the lotto. You don’t mess with it. You stick with it and just refine, refine, refine. I mean, they’re the greatest cartoon characters of all time. Those shorts are probably the best comedy shorts ever made in film, up there with Chaplin and Buster Keaton.
But Looney Tunes had 40 years with the classic directors and they played a lot with the style in the old shorts, with more graphics backgrounds, more lush backgrounds. Even with the characters, you could always see the hand of the director or the animator in the designs. It was never a rigid copy-and-paste model, it was very organic.
We did a lot of homework for the film. I got every Looney Tune short. There are 1,030 or something, and not all are available but there are people that have ways of getting them, getting copies. I wanted them as Quick Time videos on our servers for this project, so we could all reference them. It was like having the instruction manual at your fingertips. We did a lot of crew meetings where we watched the shorts, we studied them, we broke the characters down, how they moved, and how they talked.
But we also took inspiration from other movies. We talked a lot about Dumb and Dumber and Borat. Or films like The Jerk with Steve Martin: Comedic films with strong, iconic characters that have an emotional throughline but don’t really change.
There are a lot of screenwriters credited on this movie. Was it a more writers’ room set-up, like with a TV show?
I get this question a lot. So I worked with a screenwriter, Kevin Costello, on an early draft. But then Kevin and me and Alex [Kirwan] and a few others in the crew, we made the whole film over Zoom during the pandemic. We’d do 3-4 hour calls, walking through the whole film, thinking through sequences, then dropping them. Every animated thing I’ve ever made in my career has outlines and sort of rough beat lines, not scripts because I find that storyboarding is a part of the writing. When you’re doing cartooning, you’re writing and drawing at the same time. I love that. It’s why I got into television animation in the first place. I feel the best cartoony humor and Looney Tunes-style humor comes from having cartoonists write the material. So Kevin wrote a great first draft and there’s some stuff in there that still is in the film, but with the exception of Darrick [Bachman], who is a proper screenwriter, who came in later to punch up some stuff, everyone else is a storyboard artist-writer. I fought with the studio to get them all credit. The studio hates doing it, but we are writers. We are writing the words coming out of these animated mouths. We’re writing every action that they’re taking. This happens on all animated features. If you compare the original script that sells the movie, with Shrek or any of these things, it is reinvented four or five times, almost from scratch, before the final version. It’s one of the things I’m proudest about with this film is that I was able to get people the credit they were due. I wish animators could get in the WGA, but that’s a whole other battle.
I said the film has an old-school Looney Tunes feel, but there is also a lot of referential humor, breaking the fourth wall, and so on, which reminded me a lot of Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network toons.
Right. I think that’s just in our DNA now. We can’t write exact tonally correct jokes for 1945 anymore. When I was at Cal Arts, we had a great guest speaker, a director and animator, and he said: “Don’t worry about always being original. Just be yourself and put yourself into what you do, and the originality and tone will come through.” And my tone and humor is definitely Cartoon Network and SpongeBob and all that stuff, that’s in there, but that also goes for everyone that’s worked on the crew. I mean Warner Bros Animation had only made one movie before, the Teen Titans movie [2018’s Teen Titans Go! To the Movies]. None of us, or hardly any of us, had worked in features before. We approached it just like we were making an 11-minute cartoon for Cartoon Network. We worked very quickly, very fast and cheaply. It’s our generation’s style of humor. I didn’t have any sort of steadfast 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 in.
This film ends with a nod towards 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 version 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 those characters in the right hands, it would have a great future. I had a wonderful time, a wonderful experience making this movie. And I feel you could make a Looney Tunes movie out of any of those properties. The only obstacle, and I found this out when I was in some testing groups for the Looney Tunes shorts program, was that a lot of kids don’t know who Daffy Duck is. Disney’s always been good at keeping Mickey Mouse front and center with the young generation, that is why they have their preschool show and those different tiers of Mickey shows. Warner Brothers didn’t do that with Looney Tunes. And I think it’s been a mistake because, in my opinion, the Looney Tunes are much better characters.
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