<em>Cocaine Bear</em>: Why?

Two questions immediately occur to anyone watching the trailer for Cocaine Bear: Is this real? and Why? The first is easy enough to answer. The film, about a black bear that gobbles bricks of cocaine and then butchers a series of humans in rapid succession, is loosely based on a real-life black bear that, in 1985, gobbled at least part of a single brick of cocaine and then died.

The true story had no murderous rampage. When investigators finally found the corpse of the , nicknamed Pablo Eskobear, all that was left were “” and —an unseemly end for an otherwise honorable creature that was merely trawling his neighborhood for a snack (as bears do!). Long immortalized in memes as, and a popular “TIL” on , the , in March 2021, that Universal Pictures was backing a movie about him made sense. Kind of.