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If you missed “Cocaine Bear” in theaters, worry not: the absolutely preposterous slasher comedy about, yes, a coked-up bear, is coming to Peacock on April 14.
The Elizabeth Banks-directed film hits the streamer nearly two months after it premiered in theaters, where it beat box office expectations and earned an impressive $24 million during its opening weekend. The wild R-rated movie, inspired by a stranger-than-fiction story about a drug runner’s plane crash, imagines the events that would have transpired if the American black bear that ingested a duffle bag full of blow had lived to tell the tale.
It was budgeted at roughly $35 million, which was mostly dedicated to the CGI used to bring to life the coked-out beast alongside the human cast of Keri Russell, O’Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Brooklynn Prince. Its box office success marks another win for Universal following its killer-doll movie “M3GAN,” which collected $170 million globally and, like “Cocaine Bear,” also became available to stream on Peacock only seven weeks after its release.
As Variety film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in his review of “Cocaine Bear,” “Is the movie good? No. Is it bad? Not quite. Is it ridiculous in a shameless and flamboyant enough way to be a gonzo delight? Only if you set the bar low enough by going in expecting that that’s what you’re going to see, in which case the power of suggestion might tilt you toward thinking that it is. The line on ‘Cocaine Bear’ is that it’s so nutty, so luridly preposterous, so WTF-are-we-watching? that it’s all but irresistible.”
Stream “Cocaine Bear” on Peacock starting Apr. 14.