Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the cinema (while reading this article). There is a trailer running on the screen, one of those old-fashioned ones in which exciting words and phrases fly across the screen. Each word is more exciting than the last, and at the end of the imaginary trailer, you’re practically throwing your popcorn in the air of excitement. As for the words flying on the screen, here it is:
Phil Lord. Chris Miller. Elizabeth Banks. Cocaine. A bear. Cocaine bear. Coming to a cinema near you.
Exciting, right? Here is the real information, which you can imagine as a regular news article and not as a grindhouse movie trailer: Phil Lord and Chris Miller (directors of The LEGO Movie and producers in On the Spider-Verse) are producing a film called Cocaine bear with the direction of Elizabeth Banks (she had already done Pitch Perfect 2 and… Charlie’s Angels) It is comes from The Hollywood Reporter, who says specific plot details have not been revealed, but the film is based on a true story about – what else? – a bear that consumed a lot of cocaine.
Here is the story, which you can imagine how you prefer it: In 1985, a drug dealer named Andrew Thornton fell to his death because he jumped out of an airplane carrying “a very high weight while parachuting”. That load was presumably of drugs, because before his death he threw a lot of cocaine from an airplane somewhere over Georgia and, as you can probably guess from the contextual clues, that cocaine was later found by a bear (specifically a 75 kilogram black bear) The story is no longer fun after that point, because bears shouldn’t eat bags of cocaine, but that doesn’t mean Cocaine bear it’s not a very good concept for a film. These details come from a New York Times story which has (hilariously) a single paragraph, so it’s going to be interesting to see what kind of movie this will end up being, but all we need to know is that there’s Phil Lord, Chris Miller, Elizabeth Banks, a lot of cocaine, and a bear.