Ammon News - The gonzo R-rated horror comedy “Cocaine Bear” sniffed up $23.1 million in its opening weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday, while Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” shrank unusually quickly in its second weekend.
“Quantumania” was still No. 1 with an estimated $32.2 million in ticket sales in U.S. and Canadian theaters. But the “Ant-Man” sequel, hit with some of the worst reviews and audience scores of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, dropped a steep 69.7% in its second weekend. That’s the worst decline for an MCU film, falling faster than “Black Widow” (67.8%), a pandemic release that debuted simultaneously in homes.
Instead, Universal Pictures’ “Cocaine Bear” rampaged through multiplexes, scoring notably above expectations. Made for about $35 million and directed by Elizabeth Banks, “Cocaine Bear” stirred up plenty of buzz just from its title and its made-to-go-viral trailer.
“Cocaine Bear,” scripted by Jimmy Warden and produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse,” “The Lego Movie”), managed to turn a bizarre true-life tale into a tongue-in-cheek box office hit. It’s based on the real story of a 175-pound (79-kilogram) black bear who died in the Georgia mountains in 1985 after eating from a duffle bag of cocaine that had fallen from a smuggler’s plane. (The smuggler, a former Kentucky narcotics investigator, parachuted to his death in Tennessee.)