‘Cocaine Bear’ roars into theaters into this weekend

Let the rampage begin! Cocaine Bear is in theaters this weekend — the darkly comedic, bloody tru-ish tale of a bear who finds a package of cocaine in the woods and goes nuts.

Keri Russell is among the film’s stars, telling ABC Audio when she got the offer, she quickly realized she had no choice but to do it, recalling friends who warned, “If you don’t do that movie, we are not going to be friends with you anymore.'”

Keri adds that after the last few years of the COVID-19 pandemic and everything going on the world, “the idea of really like letting loose and being in a movie theater and hearing people like scream, laughing their head off and, you know, something being so ridiculously not real and gory and just a total romp, sounded attractive.”

And another secret Russell shared: the bear in the film is, in fact, CGI.

“There is, a lot of times, this amazing, you know, actor who’s trained to be like an animal,” she shares. “But often it was us in the woods with [director Elizabeth Banks] screaming on a megaphone going, okay, now he’s eating his face off! There’s blood dripping all down his body! And now he’s climbing up and there’s blood squirting all over!”

Banks says Cocaine Bear is not a “rampaging bear movie” and that “a man’s hubris is the villain…this animal inspires awe and wonder until you realize that it’s an apex predator and you should actually run for your life.”

The scariest part of the movie for Banks was it suffering the same fate as Snakes on a Plane or Sharknado, sharing, “if it didn’t work…it just would have been an embarrassment for all involved, but me most.”

(Trailer contains uncensored profanity.)

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