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The first trailer for Cocaine Bear is finally here. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, and starring the likes of Alden Ehrenreich, Keri Russell, and late actor Ray Liotta, the horror comedy takes some serious creative liberties with an already pretty wild true story, as it sees a drugged-up black bear go on a murderous rampage in Knoxville, Tennessee – and, well, the results are just as crazy as you'd expect.
Judging by the teaser, the film kicks off in the same way things did in real life: with the bear ingesting a ton of cocaine after a duffel bag of the stuff fell out of a plane in December 1985. (The pilot, a former narcotics officer and convicted drug smuggler, is said to have dropped it because the aircraft was carrying too heavy a load before he jumped off with a faulty parachute and died).
In reality, the bear's body was found three months later in northern Georgia, alongside 40 opened plastic containers of cocaine. But if we're interpreting the promo correctly, Cocaine Bear's bear eats and breathes up smaller amounts of the substance throughout the movie. High, having not overdosed right away, it sets about savagely killing a bunch of locals, tourists, and criminals.
On the human side of things, Russell's character Colette teams up with Margo Martindale's park ranger to find her young daughter (The Florida Project's Brooklynn Prince), who's gone exploring in the woods with her pal Henry (Sweet Tooth's Christian Convery). Liotta is some kind of drug lord, while Ehrenreich and O'Shea Jackson Jr. are his lackeys, and Isaiah Whitlock Jr. plays a detective.
"There was a bear," Henry shouts to Colette from a tree in the clip. "It was fucked!"
"Hey!" Martindale's character claps back. "That's inappropriate."
There's not much point of us describing the carnage that comes next, you're just going to have to check it out for yourself above.
Cocaine Bear releases in US cinemas on February 24, 2023. For more on what's coming out in the future, read our list of the most exciting upcoming movies arriving in theaters over the next year or so.
