Cocaine Bear Director Elizabeth Banks Jokes Movie Could Be “A Career Ender”

Elizabeth Banks is best known for her acting roles, but she also has some major directing experience, including helming Pitch Perfect 2 and Charlie’s Angels. Later this month, Banks’ latest movie will be hitting the big screen, and it’s already a hot topic on social media. Cocaine Bear is based on the true story of a black bear who ate an incredible amount of cocaine. Of course, the film is taking some major liberties, and Banks is fully aware that directing such a silly concept could be a risky career movie. 

“Cocaine Bear is a ginormous risk,” Banks shared with a laugh in a new interview with Variety. “This could be a career ender for me.” She added of reading the script, “The movie flashed before my eyes.” 

Cocaine Bear was written by Jimmy Warden who sent the script to Phil Lord and Christopher Miller at their production company Lord Miller. The producing duo known for The LEGO Movie and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse ended up sharing the script with Banks.

“She had a pitch deck, and it was pretty gory,” Miller explained with a laugh. “It had a lot of body parts and internal organs in it.” He added of the script, “It was one of those things where you hear the concept and you’re like, ‘That’s interesting, but is there a real movie in it?’  … But Jimmy did a great job making it into something that would be fun – better than you’d imagine for something called Cocaine Bear.”

What Happened to the Real Cocaine Bear?

Back in 1985, “Cokey the Bear” ingested an extreme amount of cocaine after a drug runner’s plane crashed. Andrew C. Thornton II was a former narcotics officer and convicted drug smuggler, who dumped a duffel bag of cocaine out of his plane because his plane was too heavy. Thornton intended to recover the bag himself, jumping out of the plane with a parachute, but the parachute was faulty, and Thornton died. Three months later, a 175-pound black bear was found dead in Georgia alongside 40 opened plastic containers of cocaine. The tale became popular in the region, and the animal itself was taxidermied and is still displayed at the Kentucky Fun Mall in Lexington, Kentucky, where you can also buy “Cokey the Bear” merch. Naturally, the movie is taking a lot of liberties. 

“I felt a lot of sympathy for the bear,” Banks told EW about the real-life Cocaine Bear. “Like, wow, this bear – which, in real life, ended up dead after eating all this coke – ended up being sort of collateral damage in this War on Drugs. And I just thought, ‘Well, then this movie can be a revenge story for the bear.’ And it just gave me a point of view and a purpose for making it. Like, there’s a real message here: ‘We should not f*ck with nature, nature will win.’”

She added in her interview with Variety, “I really felt like this is so fucked up that this bear got dragged into this drug run gone bad and ends up dead … I felt like this movie could be that bear’s revenge story.”

Cocaine Bear has a release date of February 24th.