For director Elizabeth Banks, you would think that anything was on the table when it came to making a movie called Cocaine Bear. But it turns out that there were some limits to the amount of gore in the R-rated movie – which means that we were denied seeing the bear eat a face.
Speaking to Insider, Banks says; “Everything that I wanted in is in the movie, but I did pull out some gore toward the end. Kristofer Hivju (of course best-known as beloved Game of Thrones character Tormund Giantsbane), who plays the hiker, we show an amazing prosthetic of his ripped-off face that’s the aftermath of an attack with the bear. We also filmed his death, but I took it out.”
Banks continued; “I felt by then the point had been made of what’s happening. I wanted the audience to be a little more on the emotional ride of the third act. It’s coming to a close, and I wanted people to leave happy and not be freaking out and wanting to throw up.”
Our Cocaine Bear review calls the comedy movie “rich with campy melodrama and one-liners — with the late Ray Liotta, O’Shea Jackson Jr, Christian Convery, and esteemed character actress Margo Martindale especially shining. But, it also doesn’t shy away from gore or more tension-building moments. I’d say that the gore means that Cocaine Bear isn’t a film for the faint of heart, but I feel like the title itself makes that pretty self-explanatory.” So it sounds as though it’s gory enough, without the face-ripping scene.
In our interview with the writer of Cocaine Bear, he said that the true story “was just too perfect not to pursue…it was just stranger than fiction – with Andrew Carter Thornton, duffels of coke being dropped in the Chattahoochee National Forest, and a bear getting into it. We just took that as a jumping-off point, and instead of really kind of hitting the true story, making that what inspires kind of, like, the mayhem, and turning it into a monster movie.”
Check out our guide to the other new movies you can check out in 2023.