Eliz­a­beth Banks scores her next direct­ing gig on Cocaine Bear

Everyone’s got their own issues with cin­e­ma: too many super­hero movies; not enough mid-bud­get char­ac­ter pieces; everything’s too short, everything’s too long; CGI is ruin­ing action; ana­log fetishism is hold­ing back tech­ni­cal advance­ments; and so on. But for those movie lovers whose main com­plaint is a pauci­ty of films about bears con­sum­ing ungod­ly quan­ti­ties of nar­cotics and going absolute­ly buck­wild, today is a good day.

The Hol­ly­wood Reporter has con­firmed reports of a new film with a hook too odd not to have been ripped from the head­lines: Cocaine Bear will dra­ma­tize a real-life 1985 inci­dent in which a Ken­tucky black bear con­sumed over 70 pounds of coke that had been air­dropped by drug smug­gler Andrew Thorn­ton. The bear then sum­mar­i­ly died of nature’s most unlike­ly overdose.

Eliz­a­beth Banks will direct the film, her behind-the-cam­era CV con­sist­ing of Pitch Per­fect 2 and the regret­table Charlie’s Angels reboot hav­ing appar­ent­ly made her the ide­al fit for off-beat black humor such as this. Those unsure of how it will all coa­lesce may take some solace in know­ing that stu­dio-com­e­dy vet­er­ans Phil Lord and Chris Miller have also joined the project as producers.

Of course, the big ques­tion is how screen­writer Jim­my War­den (who I hope, for the sake of this film, only coin­ci­den­tal­ly shares a name with the screen­writer behind McG’s deeply bad The Babysit­ter: Killer Queen) will mas­sage what seems to be a pret­ty sim­ple series of events into a three-act struc­ture. Could the Cocaine Bear leg­end be a jump­ing-off point for an Amer­i­can Made sort of sto­ry about nar­co-run­ners and the larg­er-than-life chal­lenges their line of work deals them?

Cocaine Bear has tak­en on his own leg­endary mys­tique in the area sur­round­ing Lex­ing­ton, revered by locals as both a folk hero and a mar­tyr in a cau­tion­ary tale on the haz­ards of drug use. He’ll have to prove his crossover appeal in a live-action vehi­cle first, but if that has legs, a Cocaine Bear ani­mat­ed adven­ture series will be all but inevitable.