Celebrity
‘Cocaine Bear’ Tops $8.6 Million on Opening Day
“Cocaine Bear” grossed an impressive $8.6 million on its first day in 3,534 theatres, including $2 million in previews.
This puts the Universal release ahead of projections for the weekend, which had the gory comedy debuting between $15 million and $17 million. A fun marketing campaign and a killer premise have propelled the film to a strong position, with a debut above $21 million now on the table.
That would be a promising start for “Cocaine Bear,” which has a $35 million production budget. The film has received mixed reviews, with top critics giving it a 51% approval rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
Audiences are also lukewarm, with the film receiving a “B-” grade from research firm Cinema Score, even though a middling grade is fairly standard for a genre release with a horror slant.
But, at the end of the day, “Cocaine Bear” is called “Cocaine Bear” for a reason; the simple premise is proving to be a hit, and audiences must see the film to believe it.
Cocaine Bear is, above all, a title and a concept, and the film recognizes this. Elizabeth Banks’ action-comedy-thriller is loosely based on a 1985 incident in which an American black bear ingested a large amount of cocaine and died soon after.
The true story of “Cocaine Bear” involves a 175-pound bag of cocaine falling out of an airplane over Georgia. A black bear ate the contents of the bag and overdosed.
The film concocts a fantastic story about what would happen if a massive bear went on a savage, indestructible, coke-fueled rampage through the Georgia woods.
The best-set piece in the film is a slapstick chase involving a stretcher, an ambulance with its back doors open, a gun, and a sprinting emergency-aid worker, and it’s reasonable to wish that Cocaine Bear had more scenes like this. However, there is also comic fun to be had in variation.
The bear can sneak up on our characters like a grim woodland menace. It can be quite energetic at times.
The film is also quite atmospheric. It wanders, like the characters, but you feel you’ve been somewhere by the end.
Banks and Co. appear to have intentionally set out to create a cult film. That is typically a backward approach. Cult movies develop into cult status over time; they do not begin as such.
