Cokey was almost way more coked-up in ‘Cocaine Bear’ before VFX changes

How much cocaine is too much cocaine? It’s an age-old question, and one the makers of the quirky hit movie Cocaine Bear had to deal with when making it. Apparently, the initial cut for Cokey the bear was way too hyped, and producers decided they needed to tone it down a bit.

This fun bear-sized bite of movie trivia comes to us courtesy of Comicbook.com. Filmmakers wanted the bear to be as coked out as possible, so they really pushed for the cocaine-fueled theatrics. Robin Hollander, an artist for Wētā FX, said it went so far they actually had to knock it back a ways.

“I think where we dialed it back, and I think where we initially dialed it all to 11 and then came back to maybe a six, was just with her sort of facial mannerisms and behaviors. We gave her a lot of ticks and a lot of gurning and sort of gashing of the teeth and a bit more of a swagger when she would walk post-ambulance crash for instance.”

I don’t know about you, but creating mannerisms using the scale of “extremely coked up” to “holy hell that’s too much,” sounds kind of fun. Hollander said it was important to not make it comical (a cocaine-driven bear on its own takes care of that).

“That’s really the only time you see her sort of falling around a little bit. She’s just been knocked around. She’s had a lot of coke, she’s had a lot of blood. In stress testing our animation puppet and our pipeline if you will, we really pushed that to the extreme and showed it. And I’m not saying it wouldn’t have worked, but I think quite quickly everyone agreed that this is now taking her too much into the comical.”

At the end of the day, it’s a story about a coked up bear, but not a too coked up bear. “I think we really wanted to straddle that fine line of, it’s a real bear, but she’s acting a little bit weird. But now, yeah, it’s gone too far,” Hollander said.

In case you’ve been hiding in the forest, Cocaine Bear is the real life story of a bear who got into some cocaine. The real story involves an American black bear that got into 175 pounds of cocaine… and immediately overdosed, sadly. The movie isn’t so anticlimactic, though.

In the movie, the bear goes on a crazy drug-fueled murder rampage. The movie’s making a lot of money, so chances are we’ll see Cokey (or a Cokey relative) again.

Cocaine Bear is in theaters now.