Cocaine Bear will be released in February 2023
(Picture: Cocaine Bear)It’s a story right out of your wildest nightmares: a bear eats a bag of cocaine (that’s right, a bag) and goes on a drug-fuelled rampage, leaving behind a pile of bodies.
This is the premise of upcoming film Cocaine Bear – and remarkably, it’s not as far-fetched as it might sound. The film is based loosely (very loosely) on a series of true events, which have been given the Hollywood treatment. With the trailer going viral online, and the film due to hit cinemas soon, how much is fact and how much fiction?
We break it down...
The true story
The tale of Cocaine Bear stems back to the 1980s (September 1985, to be precise), when investigators in the US state of Georgia found a dead black bear in the forest, next to a duffel bag stuffed with 70 pounds of cocaine, worth around $20m.
Well, it had contained 70 pounds of cocaine. When law enforcement got there, forty of the packets had been ripped open and the 150-pound bear had consumed them all, then died from a massive overdose – the following autopsy confirmed cerebral haemorrhaging and heart failure as key factors in its death.
″The bear got to it before we could, and he tore the duffel bag open, got him some cocaine and OD’d,″ said Gary Garner, who headed the Georgia Bureau of Investigation at the time. ″There’s nothing left but bones and a big hide.”
The bear – dubbed Pablo Eskobear – had been dead for around four weeks before investigators found it, so it’s anybody’s guess what could have transpired in that time – as the film makes clear.
Equally intriguingly, it was later established that the bear didn’t actually eat the entire amount of cocaine that was present in the duffel bag. There were a few bricks unaccounted for, that nobody has ever confessed to stealing; like so many things in this story, what happened is anybody’s guess.
And where is the bear now? It was stuffed and, after changing hands a few times, was finally put on display at a mall which sells cocaine-themed merchandise. Because that’s the kind of world we live in.
The film version
Apart from Cocaine Bear’s death, everything else has been treated with lashings of dramatic licence, and then some. As the film’s synopsis puts it, it examines what might happen when “a 500 pound apex predator has ingested a staggering amount of cocaine and gone on a coke-fueled rampage for more blow … and blood.”
Directed by actor Elizabeth Banks, Cocaine Bear charts the bear’s drug-fuelled exploits after ingesting his mega-haul. In the trailer, this includes hunting down civilians, leaping onto ambulances and doing the worm dance move. And all the while, traffickers and police are trying to hunt down the missing drugs, unaware that the creature that has ingested most of them is actually headed their way.
The film will also touch on the fascinating story of wannabe cocaine baron Andrew C Thornton II (played by Matthew Rhys), who was responsible for the massive drug drop in question.
Thornton, the son of Kentucky horse breeders and a narcotics police officer gone bad, was flying a Cessna on a return trip from Colombia when he overheard federal agents talking about tailing his plane over Florida.
He tried to avoid them by kicking the duffel bags of cocaine out of the plane over Georgia and parachuting out shortly afterwards – the bags, and plane, were later discovered by officials, and the tenth bag was discovered with the bear.
Unfortunately, the parachute malfunctioned and Thornton plunged to his death. He was found with 77 pounds of cocaine, along with two pistols and a survival knife, as well as around $4,500 in cash.
Who’s starring in the film?
Perhaps surprisingly, Cocaine Bear boasts its fair share of star power, including the late Goodfellas actor Ray Liotta in one of his last-ever screen performances before his death in May 2022.
Welshman Rhys and his wife and The Americans co-star Keri Russell top the bill, alongside Margo Martindale, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Kristofer Hivju (who played Tormund Giantsbane in Game of Thrones) and Alden Ehrenreich as Marty.
