Hitting theaters in February 2023, Elizabeth Banks‘ Cocaine Bear may have earned a decent box office collection worldwide with its outlandish story, but did you know it’s not remotely close to the truth?
The comedy-horror was based on the infamous Cocaine Bear legend, where a bear overdosed on an obscene number of narcotics and was the only wildlife victim in the criminal games. The 2023 film showed a coked-up bear going on a bloody rampage and leaving behind a trail of bodies, but that’s just an exaggerated gory picture Banks’ imagination fueled.
In a new trailer for their upcoming documentary, Peacock promises to reveal the actual legend. Cocaine Bear: The True Story will use archival footage and old interviews to focus on the real story featuring dangerous people, criminal gangs, drugs, and murder mixed in with an innocent and unlucky bear.
Before you view the doc-film, let me lay out the key similarities between the two stories. In 1985, a few drug smugglers were transporting a batch of illegal drugs via a small airplane. But things went sideways when 40 containers of the cargo dropped, and a failed parachute resulted in Andrew C. Thornton II’s death.
The lost drugs were found by a bear in the woods, who ingested nearly 75 pounds of cocaine. That’s about the only few things the 2023 fictional film got right. But the bizarrely overreaching story did score some good reviews from critics and audiences, and it certainly delivered what it promised – cringy laughter.
In the real story, the bear soon died of an overdose, and no civilians were ever harmed. The unlucky bear was later taxidermized and was put on display at the Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area in Tennessee and later shifted to a mall in Lexington, Kentucky.
Cocaine Bear: The True Story will be available for streaming on Peacock from April 14, 2023, the same day as Cocaine Bear’s streaming premiere. So why don’t you binge on the fictional and the actual story of the wild bear that did a bunch of coke and drop your comments below?
About Cocaine Bear
Cocaine Bear is an upcoming American dark comedy thriller film directed and co-produced by Elizabeth Banks from a screenplay by Jimmy Warden. It is inspired by the true story of the “Cocaine Bear”, an American black bear that ingested a duffel bag full of cocaine in 1985.
The film features an ensemble cast that includes Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Christian Convery-Jennings, Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Kristofer Hivju, Hannah Hoekstra, Aaron Holliday, Margo Martindale, and Ray Liotta in one of his final performances before his death.
Cocaine Bear is scheduled to be released in the United States on February 24, 2023, by Universal Pictures.
Source: YouTube
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