With “Cocaine Bear” now out in cinemas, those involved have begun talking spoilers and what potentially comes next.
Inspired by the 1985 true story of a drug runner’s plane crash, missing cocaine, and the black bear that ate it, the story sees an oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converge on a Georgia forest where a 500- pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of cocaine and gone on a coke-fueled rampage.
Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, Alden Ehrenrich, and the late Ray Liotta co-star. Though the film is rated R, the film’s director Elizabeth Banks says they opted to trim back the gore a little in the film’s final act – including one key character death (SPOILERS AHEAD). She tells EW:
“I just didn’t think we could make a movie about a rampaging bear on a bender without the gore. I mean, bears literally eat their prey alive. [Still,] at the very end of the process, we ended up cutting back on a few shots of gore in the third act of the film.
I just felt at that point the audience was on more of an emotional journey and I didn’t want to distract from it. So, for instance, Olaf, the hiker who gets murdered, we had some incredible prosthetics of him, they ripped off his whole face, and we had a close-up of it that is no longer in the movie. Maybe in the director’s cut we’ll get some of that back in.”
That sounds hopeful of a longer, unrated edition hitting the home video market. The film’s writer Jimmy Warden has indicated to Variety he’s already thinking about extending his film into a franchise:
“For the sequels, I definitely have ideas for that. The bear’s not the bad guy in this movie. What happened is a product of circumstance and everybody else’s poor decisions. I think that is a story that we can continue to tell over and over again. I’d be excited to tell it because there are some really good ideas that we have for the subsequent movies.”
The projections are coming in with the film set to potentially earn up to $20 million this weekend domestically.
