Cocaine Bear opens in theaters later this month, but it may not be too soon to be talking about a cinematic universe of drug-fueled animals. Director Elizabeth Banks told PEOPLE that she may not be opposed to taking on a story equally as wild as the story of the real-life cocaine bear: that of the cocaine shark. On Wednesday, “cocaine shark” became a trending topic on social media after New Zealand officials reported the discovery of more than three tons of cocaine floating in the Pacific Ocean. To be clear, it doesn’t seem like a “cocaine shark” actually exists, but the idea was enough to get fans making the comparison to Cocaine Bear — though in a poll conducted by AMC Theatres on Twitter, most fans felt like the bear would soundly win.
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“I’ve seen that, If there’s a great story, then sure,” Banks said when asked if she would take on another “cocaine” animal story. “Jaws with cocaine, I don’t see how that loses.”
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 said previously. “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.”
So Cocaine Bear is based on a true story?
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.
