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.
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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.
