Space Jam: A New Legacy marked the return of the Looney Tunes to the big screen in yet another basketball game, but why did it take Bugs Bunny and company 18 years to get another movie? Since their debut in 1930, the Looney Tunes have gone on a variety of adventures, but none as unique as what they went through in 1996 in Joe Pytka’s Space Jam. The movie took the Looney Tunes to space and added professional basketball to the mix through Michael Jordan, who led the Toon Squad to success.
Space Jam told a fictionalized version of what happened during Michael Jordan’s initial retirement in 1993 and his return in 1995, during which he was recruited by Bugs Bunny to help the Looney Tunes win a basketball game against a team of aliens known as Monstars, who wanted to enslave them. Although Space Jam wasn’t a favorite among critics, the audience welcomed it with open arms and made it a success, opening up a new path for the Looney Tunes on the big screen. In 2003, Bugs and friends returned in another movie, titled Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which wasn’t a Space Jam sequel and instead gave them a separate story, but it failed to connect with the audience.
Looney Tunes: Back in Action saw Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck helping an aspiring daredevil (played by Brendan Fraser) and a Warner Bros. executive (Jenna Elfman) find the “blue monkey” diamond to prevent Mr. Chairman (Steve Martin) of the Acme Corporation from using it to turn everyone into monkeys that will manufacture his products. Back in Action failed to have the same success as Space Jam and was a box office bomb, but it got more positive reviews than the Tune Squad’s adventure in space. After Back in Action, the Looney Tunes stayed away from the big screen and stuck to TV shows, direct-to-film movies, and short films, and made their return 18 years later with Space Jam: A New Legacy.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why Warner Bros. took so long to bring the Looney Tunes back to the big screen, as these characters haven’t lost any popularity points since Back in Action came out. As mentioned above, the squad continued to appear in TV shows and smaller film projects, such as the direct-to-video Christmas movie Bah, Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas, and in 2012, the studio announced plans for a reboot movie titled Acme, with Steve Carell rumored to take the lead role, but the movie never entered production. The reason for the Looney Tunes to stay away from the big screen for over a decade, then, could be as simple as Warner Bros. choosing to focus on smaller adventures that are more guaranteed to connect with the audience due to these giving the characters more freedom to be themselves and to the lack of a good story that could bring them back to cinemas, especially after the underperformance of Back in Action.
The Looney Tunes got another chance in Space Jam: A New Legacy, which took the basic premise of the original Space Jam movie by having the Tune Squad go against another team in a basketball game with Bugs and friends led by an NBA star, this time LeBron James. However, Space Jam 2 sidelined the Looney Tunes and put all the weight of the story on LeBron, which has been a contributing factor to the audience’s mixed reaction to it. Whether plans for a third Space Jam movie will come to fruition or not is unknown, but hopefully, it won’t take another 18 years for the Looney Tunes to get another big-screen adventure.
