The only real chatter of Film Twitter today has all been about Elizabeth Banks’ “Cocaine Bear” following the film’s trailer release earlier today.
The film is inspired by with the real-life events surrounding the 1985 dumping of around forty containers with $14 million dollars worth of cocaine in a Georgia forest that had been dropped from a small plane smuggling the drug in from Colombia.
Police found a 175-pound black bear had consumed all the containers and had died from massive organ failure following possibly the largest overdose in history. The movie offers a darkly comic spin on that with the bear surviving and seeking bloody revenge, but deliberately keeps the original 1985 period setting.
Banks tells Slashfilm that the movie will deal with America’s failed war on drugs with social commentary on the whole D.A.R.E. and “Just Say No” style schemes woven into the fabric of the movie. She adds: “this felt a little bit like the bear’s revenge story because the bear became collateral damage in that failed war.”
“Cocaine Bear” is also going to pay serious homage to horror films of that period:
“I do love these movies, and I love horror, and I love gore. And I love horror comedy. I love Sam Raimi, and I love John Carpenter… This takes place in 1985, so it’s a real opportunity to create a homage to some of those kinds of films, but also to do something really unique tonally because it’s also a character piece.”
However, they’re also striving for some level of accuracy. The team did extensive bear research and tried to make the bear (nicknamed ‘Cokey’) as realistic as possible – with a bit of artistic license once it had ingested the narcotic:
“The bear is as photorealistic, Nat Geo documentary as you can make the bear, from the beginning. But we also knew that once the bear had coke, that was our little magic sprinkle dust that we can put on the bear and ‘oh we can get away with a couple of things!’.”
Ray Liotta delivers his final onscreen performance in the film, which also stars Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Brooklynn Prince, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Alden Ehrenreich. Jimmy Warden penned the script, while Phil Lord and Chris Miller are among the producers.
“Cocaine Bear” is slated to open in cinemas on February 24th 2023.
