Cocaine Bear Movie Will Have Serious Gore, Of Course, Because Bears Eat Their Prey Alive

The upcoming film Cocaine Bear tells a wild story about a bear that got into some cocaine and went on a killing rampage, and the film will--you guessed it--be full of graphic violence. Director Elizabeth Banks said in an interview with Variety that she pushed for a certain level of violence in the movie, which is rated R.

As part of her research, Banks said she learned about how bears eat their prey, and it's not for the faint of heart. "They don't kill their prey before they eat it. They just start eating it alive," she said. "I don't recommend anyone do this, but if you go down the internet hole of looking at actual animal attacks on humans, it's f**king gnarly as sh**."

Banks said she grew up watching Evil Dead and is a big fan of gore in films. "The gore is part of the fun of the ride," she said.

The bear in Cocaine Bear was created by Lord of the Rings effects studio Weta, and Banks said the creature will look realistic. "It had to feel like a NatGeo documentary about a bear that did cocaine," she said. "It couldn't be something silly. It couldn't seem animated in any way."

Also in the interview, Banks said she "definitely took gore out" of Cocaine Bear after seeing the first cut, but not all that much. The report suggested that some scenes involving actor Ray Liotta, who died just a week after recoding dialogue for the movie, may have been toned down. "She took particular care" with a scene involving the bear and the drug dealer played by Liotta, the report said.

Cocaine Bear could end up being controversial for reasons beyond the violence. The movie opens with 12-year-olds finding the cocaine in the woods and sampling it. "There were conversations about, should we age up these characters? We all kind of held hands and we were like, 'Guys, they've got to be 12.' It's their innocence being tested," Banks said. "That's what was interesting to me about that scene."

Cocaine Bear, which also stars Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Matthew Rhys, Keri Russell, Margo Martindale, and Alden Ehrenreich, releases on February 24.

The film is based on the true story of a bear that found cocaine in the woods dropped by a drug-smuggler. In real life, the bear didn't kill anyone while high on drugs, and later died of an overdose, but that wouldn't make for a good movie, now would it.

In other news, authorities recently discovered 3.5 tons of cocaine floating in the Pacific Ocean, and this prompted fans to wonder if a sequel called Cocaine Shark might be next.