It’s safe to say that ‘Cocaine Bear’ is one of the most anticipated movies of next year for the sheer stupidity of the concept behind it and people are only going to get more amped for it as further details about it emerge.
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Director Elizabeth Banks recently appeared at a screening of the movie’s trailer and revealed the following specifics about the upcoming motion picture event:
Here’s @ElizabethBanks talking about the late, great Ray Lioatta’s performance in COCAINE BEAR.
RIP to a legend. pic.twitter.com/D8eolJfCty
— brandon wenerd (@brandonwenerd) November 30, 2022
This takes place in 1985.
So this is a real opportunity to create an homage to 80s zany comedies, but also to do something really unique tonally because it is also a character piece.
I remember when I read this story thinking, ‘I have a lot of empathy for the bear.
I was like, ‘This is really upsetting.’ This bear is the collateral damage of our truly f*cked up war on drugs, and I feel like we should make a movie that is the bear’s revenge story. And that’s what this is.
All my films so far mostly are about underdogs.
The bear is CGI and was conceived by looking at tons of reference photos of black bears and figuring out the size and the shape and the markings and everything.
Bears walk on their hind legs.
They actually walk around on two feet a lot. They get up, they grab stuff, they walk around.
We looked at a lot of bears doing fun, silly things and tried to figure out what we could have the bear do.
We comment on the war on drugs pretty directly in the movie actually.
Brooklyn Prince plays a 12-year-old girl in 1985 in this movie. I was a 12 year-old-girl in 1985 in real life. And, obviously, I remember DARE and Just Say No and Crack Is Whack. It’s a reaction to the whole drug epidemic that we were going through.
I look back now and it just all seems so insane. What happened? What did we fix? I don’t know. I really wish we’d spent a lot of these resources on other things. So that’s it’s in the fabric of the movie, the ridiculousness of a bear high on cocaine because of the War on Drugs, forcing somebody to drop drugs out of an airplane is f*cking nuts.
This felt a little bit like the bear’s revenge story because this bear became collateral damage in that failed war.
Ray Liotta plays our drug kingpin. He plays Andrew Thornton’s boss. Basically, Andrew Thornton’s the guy who throws the drugs off the plane. And he wants to find his drugs. But one of the surprising things about the script for this movie is that one of the main themes of the film is parenting.
You wouldn’t know it from the trailer but, it’s really about fathers and sons and fathers and daughters. And people protecting their cubs. I really felt like that’s what Ray brought a real warmth to this. And he had a really great sense of humour about it too. He had some great zingers in the movie.
It really is a story about fathers and sons and parenting and taking care of each other in crazy times. That’s one of the thematics too – when things are going totally sideways, who can you count on?
Well that sounds like they’ve put way more thought into the movie than I first imagined, as the idea for a movie about a bear high on cocaine going on a rampage sort of writes itself and can be pumped out in a few minutes. Not really sure if all this cutting social and political commentary is actually necessary for this movie, but I’m still definitely gonna watch it when it comes out in February. Gonna be special.
For more of the same, check out the trailer to ‘Cocaine Bear’ here. Looks very silly, despite what Elizabeth Banks is saying.
