Elizabeth Banks Making Cocaine Bear 2?
Elizabeth Banks is ready for another box office high. As covered by The Hollywood Reporter, the director behind last spring’s Cocaine Bear is open to making a sequel to the bloody genre picture that saw a cocaine-fueled black bear rage through the Georgia forest.
Elizabeth Banks enjoyed making Cocaine Bear, and is open to making a sequel, which considering the success of the first film, seems inevitable.
“I loved how subversive, crazy, silly, and funny it was,” Banks said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “We had a lot [of] fun, and if I got the opportunity to surprise the audience and delight myself again, I would take it.”
Elizabeth Banks was not the only one jazzed up about the wacky hyperviolence of Cocaine Bear. The film outpaced its tracking, earning over $23 million in its first weekend, trailing only behind Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Cocaine Bear finished its theatrical run with a whopping $89 million against its roughly $35 million production budget.
With Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks beat mediocre critic reviews with crowd-pleasing fun and a premise that invites irresistible curiosity. The film was loosely based on actual events; a bear did actually ingest a large quantity of cocaine that was lost in the forest, but only the bear died as a result. Banks and screenwriter Jimmy Warden took some liberties to expand Cocaine Bear into a gruesome and gory monster movie.
“I loved how subversive, crazy, silly, and funny it was. We had a lot [of] fun, and if I got the opportunity to surprise the audience and delight myself again, I would take it.”
Elizabeth Banks on making Cocaine Bear 2
The financial success of Cocaine Bear certainly keeps the door open for Elizabeth Banks to return for a sequel. It may seem that there is nowhere for the story to go, but the filmmakers invented most of the first film’s plot, so why not try a sequel?
According to Elizabeth Banks, the door is open for just about anything. She spoke about her expansive interests, noting that Cocaine Bear showed off her knack for making genre movies that departed from her previous directorial efforts, such as Pitch Perfect 2 and Charlie’s Angels.
She also addressed rumors that she had taken a meeting with Marvel. Rumors have circled for some time that Elizabeth Banks pitched her take on Thor: Ragnarok to Marvel executives a few years ago. Banks clarified that she never pitched Marvel, but that Thor is the MCU character she would be most interested to take on.
Banks said she embrace a superhero project if the right material came her way. The world may yet get to see what an Elizabeth Banks superhero movie looks like, but she has other projects to get to first.
Elizabeth Banks Isn’t Slowing Down
Banks recently starred in the Apple TV+ comedy The Beanie Bubble, the true story of the rise of the Beanie Baby toy line. She is also set to star in Illumination’s animated comedy Migration, as well as an adaptation of Carl Shuker’s medical drama novel A Mistake.
On the directing front, Elizabeth Banks will next take on The Greater Good, a TV movie pitched as a comedic take on The X-Files. The conspiracy theory comedy is written by former The Office and Arrested Development writer Caroline Williams.
Cocaine Bear 2 may not be on the way yet, but the existence of the first one proves that anything is possible. Elizabeth Banks is turning out to be a fascinating filmmaker, and her unpredictable trajectory makes her story, and the prospect of a Cocaine Bear sequel, worth roaring about.
