Looney Tunes & Their Long, Sparse History Of Movies: From 1975’s ‘Bugs Bunny: Superstar’ To The Upcoming ‘The Day The Earth Blew Up’, Here’s A List Of The Films They Released
Before The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie hit screens, here's a look at the other films the cartoon makers released in theatres.
Looney Tunes & Their Long, Sparse History Of Movies: From 1975’s Bugs Bunny: Superstar To The Upcoming The Day The Earth Blew Up, Here’s A List Of The Films They Released (Picture Credit: IMDb)
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The Looney Tunes will be returning to movie theaters with 2024’s The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. While it may not seem like they’ve been gone that long, since their last theatrical appearance was 2021’s Space Jam: A New Legacy, they have had a strange history when it comes to gracing feature films.
The first technical Looney Tunes films started in 1975 with Bugs Bunny: Superstar. While this film did air in theaters, it’s not exactly an original animated film. It’s a compilation film of previous Looney Tunes shorts like What’s Cookin’ Doc and Hair-Raising Hare. So it was less of a movie and more of a best-of-motion picture, bringing back all the classics to the big screen.
This became the formula for a slew of theatrical LT movies that followed, which included 1979’s The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie, 1981’s The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie, and 1988’s Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters. There was some original animation added in, but the vast majority of the animation for these films was amassed from raiding the Warner vaults for classic shorts.
The first original Looney Tunes film was 1996’s Space Jam. Starring Michael Jordan as himself, the uniquely 90s film featured the familiar characters of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others competing in a basketball game with aliens for the fate of their cartoon world. Although the film was more or less an excuse to cash in on Jordan’s notoriety for appearing in commercials alongside Looney Tunes characters, the feature film that merged 2D animation with live-action basketball proved to be a box office success. Space Jam would gross $250 million on a budget of $80 million.
Space Jam (1996) (Picture Credit: IMDb)
Space Jam’s success would likely garner a sequel, but that production stalled going into the 2000s. It was also during this time that the twilight years of Saturday morning cartoons led to Looney Tunes leaving syndicated channels after running for decades. This culminated with the poor reception for 2003’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action. Directed by Joe Dante, the film was similar to Space Jam in how it paired up Bugs and Daffy with Brendan Fraser, Jenna Elfman, and Steve Martin. Although critically received better than Space Jam, Back in Action flopped, and Looney Tunes would leave the theatrical stage for many years.
Looney Tunes Back in Action (2003) (Picture Credit: IMDb)
Thankfully, Looney Tunes has undergone a revival since those darker days. A series of Looney Tunes TV shows eventually led to the development of Space Jam finally getting back on track. The Max streaming service hosted a new batch of Looney Tunes cartoons that felt classic and faithful to the original shorts of the 1930s and 1940s. That format is what laid the groundwork for the upcoming film, The Day the Earth Blew Up. This film will reportedly centers on Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as they try to save the Earth from an alien invasion.
Will the Looney Tunes score big at the box office? 2024 will tell us when the new Looney Tunes film theatrically debuts without the aid of live-action.
