Three years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery decided Coyote vs. Acme was worth more dead than alive and shelved the finished film as an accounting write-off. On Friday, August 28, it finally opens in theaters, and the most precise measure of its redemption is not a headline. It is a Kalshi board, ticker KXRT-COY, where a single strike traded 10,680 contracts in 24 hours as the market argued about one percentage point. The film's Tomatometer sits at 95% as I write this on Thursday afternoon, and the two contracts that matter, "Above 94" and "Above 95," straddle that number exactly. This board is not really pricing a movie anymore. What it prices now is a rounding line, and that makes it the cleanest live example I have seen of what these markets actually trade on. Further down, I will walk through the arithmetic on exactly how many reviews it takes to move Monday's settlement print, because that math, not the trailer, is what the 75-cent price is made of.
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The Quick Answer
Kalshi's Coyote vs. Acme market settles on the film's Tomatometer score next Monday, August 31 at 10:00 AM ET, and with the score sitting at exactly 95%, the "Above 94" contract last traded at 75 cents while "Above 95" doubled off the prior close, 13 cents to 26. Because "above" is strict, a score that lands exactly on a strike loses, so the market is effectively pricing where a rounded percentage prints after one more weekend of incoming reviews. The full 16-strike board, and the review-by-review math that decides it, is below.
These are market prices and model estimates, not predictions of fact and not financial advice. Kalshi is a CFTC-regulated event-contract exchange (18+; availability varies by state).
The Board: Every Strike On KXRT-COY
Each contract asks one yes/no question: will the film's Tomatometer score be above that strike at settlement? A Yes pays $1, a No pays $0, and the price reads as a rough probability. If cents-to-probability is new to you, our Kalshi odds explainer covers the conversion, and what the price means covers the caveats. The board runs 16 strikes deep, from Above 45 to Above 97, but the bottom ten are heavily favored in the market's eyes: every strike from Above 45 through Above 90 last traded at 99 cents. The contest lives in the top six rows, pulled from the exchange as of August 27, 2026, Thursday afternoon ET:
| Strike | Last Price | 24h Volume (contracts) | Open Interest (contracts) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Above 92 | 91¢ | 1,478 | 11,675 |
| Above 93 | 91¢ | 996 | 5,991 |
| Above 94 | 75¢ | 3,028 | 10,318 |
| Above 95 | 26¢ | 10,680 | 41,792 |
| Above 96 | 4¢ | 6,969 | 19,397 |
| Above 97 | 1¢ | 5,067 | 32,013 |
The row worth staring at is Above 95. It carries 41,792 contracts of open interest, the most on the board, and its 24-hour volume is the highest of any strike. Its last price doubled from 13 cents to 26 cents in a day, while Above 94 moved from a 57-cent previous price to a 75-cent last trade. Two caveats before you treat those as quotes. First, a last print is not a live market: Above 94 sat 76 bid against 81 ask at the pull, so the tradable read on a 95-or-better print is closer to 78% than 75. Second, the 91-cent tie between Above 92 and Above 93 cannot literally be right, because a lower strike is strictly easier to clear; the tie is most likely a stale print on 92, where the live market was 90 bid against 94 ask, next to a last trade on 93 that lifted the ask. On a board this thin, the last-price column is a rumor and the bid-ask is the fact. None of that changes the bigger picture: the repricing is not the market reacting to the film getting better or worse. Every one of those reviews was written days or weeks ago. The move is the market reacting to where the counted total drifted, which is the part of this story that started long before the exchange listed a single contract.
From Shelved Write-Off To A $50 Million Bet
The review pool moving this board only exists because of a rescue. Coyote vs. Acme was completed, then shelved by Warner Bros. Discovery in 2023 so the company could write off its budget. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights in March 2025 for a reported $50 million, and the August 28, 2026 theatrical date was announced later at San Diego Comic-Con. The film itself is a live-action and animation hybrid in which Wile E. Coyote hires a lawyer and sues the Acme Corporation over a lifetime of defective products, with Will Forte, John Cena, and Lana Condor on screen and Eric Bauza voicing the Looney Tunes characters. When reviews finally landed this month, the film a studio had shelved as worthless came back as one of the best-reviewed wide releases of the year. Forbes noted on August 25 that its 96% score, on 104 reviews at the time, ranked third among 2026's wide releases and made it the highest-scored Looney Tunes movie outside a 1979 compilation that carries 100% on roughly five reviews predating the Tomatometer.
Notice the two numbers in that last sentence, because they are the setup for everything the board is doing now. On Tuesday the film sat at 96% with 104 reviews counted. By Thursday afternoon, Rotten Tomatoes listed 137 reviews and a Certified Fresh 95%. The score did not collapse; a handful of negative reviews simply entered a pool that was still small enough for each one to matter. That one-point slide is precisely what sent Above 95 traders scrambling, and it is why this market rewards people who understand what actually moves a prediction market rather than people with strong opinions about Wile E. Coyote.
The Arithmetic Of One Review
Here is the knife-edge. The two public numbers I pulled Thursday were the 95% score and the 137-review count. If Rotten Tomatoes rounds to the nearest whole number, the only split of 137 reviews that displays as 95 is 130 positive against 7 negative, a raw 94.9 sitting just above the rounding line. That split is arithmetic, not a figure I read off the page, and everything below builds on it, so treat it as a working assumption rather than a certified count.
Now run the two directions a single review can push that print:
Down: one more negative review, with nothing landing beside it, makes the raw math roughly 130 of 138, which is 94.2%. That prints 94. Because Kalshi's "above" is strict, a settlement print of 94 means "Above 94" resolves No. In other words, at the listed totals, one negative review arriving at the wrong moment turns a 75-cent contract into a zero. And the recovery is slow: after that hypothetical eighth negative review, the film would need roughly eight consecutive positive reviews just to climb back over the 94.5 rounding line.
Up: for the print to reach 96, the raw percentage has to clear 95.5. With 7 negatives in the pool, the arithmetic requires roughly 149 positives, about 19 straight positive reviews between Thursday and Monday morning with zero misses. That is what the 26-cent "Above 95" price is actually pricing: 33 reviews landed in the two days to Thursday, so the volume needed to move the print is clearly arriving; the question is the composition of what lands next. If even one or two land negative, the target moves further away with each miss. One honesty note on the 19: it depends on the rounding assumption. If Rotten Tomatoes truncated decimals instead of rounding, the implied split would be 131 against 6, and a 96 print would need closer to 13 straight positives. The downside case is the same under either convention, one negative review prints 94, which is why the fragile side of this board is the side I would trust the math on.
There is one more number hiding in the two dated readings, and I think it is the most important one on the page. Tuesday's reading, 96% on 104 reviews, only works if the split then was 100 positive against 4 negative; that one is unique under either convention. Set Thursday's implied split next to it and the 33 reviews that arrived in between ran somewhere between 30-of-33 and 31-of-33 positive, a clip in the low 90s. That sounds healthy until you put it against the 94.5 line the print lives on: reviews arriving in the low 90s dilute a 94.9 pool. Nothing dramatic has to go wrong for this score to sag; the incoming mix just has to keep doing what it did over the last two days. On the rounded-split reading, roughly 20 more reviews at that mix cross under the line on their own.
Put those together and the ladder stops looking like an opinion poll and starts looking like a distribution. Reading through the live bid-ask mids rather than the stale prints, Above 94 near 78 and Above 95 near 27, the market's implied modal outcome is a settlement print of exactly 95, at roughly a coin flip, with about a one-in-five chance the print slips to 94 or lower and about a one-in-four chance it reaches 96. All of that hangs on review totals I pulled Thursday; the counted pool will keep moving through the weekend. That churn is the entire point of the exercise.
What Monday At 10 AM ET Actually Settles
The rules text on KXRT-COY-95 is short: "If Coyote vs. Acme has a Tomatometer score of above 95 on Aug 31, 2026 at 10:00 AM ET, then the market resolves to Yes." The fine print adds the two clauses that decide everything. The market is determined the Monday after wide release, as a single snapshot, and a score exactly on the strike resolves No; Kalshi's own example is that a score of 75 resolves "Above 75" as No.
We wrote up the full mechanics of this market family, including a settled case study where the snapshot-and-tie rules graded a whole board, in our Kalshi Rotten Tomatoes markets explainer, and the broader settlement machinery lives in how Kalshi settlement works. The one-sentence version for this board: whatever the Tomatometer says Monday at 10:00 AM ET is the whole ballgame, and the number your phone shows Tuesday is trivia. The Certified Fresh badge is decoration here too; Kalshi's own rules call the Fresh subtitles illustrative only. If you are newer to event contracts generally, start with how prediction markets work and note that Kalshi's fees bite hardest exactly here, on contracts priced near the middle of the range.
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The Read
Strip the nostalgia off and the board is asking a three-way question: does Monday's print slip to 94, hold at 95, or climb to 96? The prices, read off the live mids, pay roughly a coin flip on exactly 95, about one-in-five on the slide, and about one-in-four on the climb, and the part I keep coming back to is that the two tails are not built the same. The climb to 96 needs somewhere between 13 and 19 consecutive positive reviews, depending on the rounding convention, with zero misses across a wide-release weekend. The slide to 94 needs exactly one miss at today's totals, and the tape leans that way: the last 33 reviews arrived at a clip below the line the print has to hold. The prices treat those routes as near mirror images; the arithmetic says one of them runs uphill, and how you weigh that gap is a judgment I will leave with you. Warner Bros. Discovery priced this film as a write-off three years ago; the market is now pricing a very different public signal, one incoming critic at a time, and the fine print grades everyone holding a position at 10:00 AM ET Monday. The snapshot, not the score you check afterward, is the story.
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