Earlier than Cocaine Bear, The Bear Roared Into Theaters 35 Years In the past – The Hollywood Reporter

Cocaine Bear, hitting theaters Feb. 24 from Common, doesn’t mark Hollywood’s first fascination with bears, though it is likely to be the one mission concerning the animal’s rampage after ingesting an enormous quantity of the titular drug.

Taking a extra naturalistic strategy was 1988’s The Bear, which instructed the story of an grownup bear befriending an orphaned cub as they flee human hunters. Director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who gained the foreign-language Oscar for 1976’s Black and White in Coloration, tailored James Oliver Curwood’s 1916 novel The Grizzly King for the movie. Annaud thought of 50 bears because the grownup grizzly, ultimately casting a 1,500-pound Kodiak named Bart the Bear, later seen in White Fang (1991), Legends of the Fall (1994) and The Edge (1997). Cinematographer Philippe Rousselot recollects the challenges of utilizing actual animals — the 2 bears may not often be filmed collectively.

“The massive one would have killed the small one,” he tells THR. “Bart was splendidly effectively educated, however nonetheless unpredictable and harmful at occasions.”

After a European run in 1988, TriStar launched The Bear in North America on Oct. 27, 1989, with THR‘s assessment praising Bart for the “bare honesty to its feelings.” It related with audiences, amassing $31 million domestically ($76 million as we speak), and landed an Oscar nomination for finest movie modifying. It additionally spurred an Oscar marketing campaign for Bart, who ultimately made an look on the 1998 ceremony with presenter Mike Myers. (Bart died in 2000 at age 23.)

Throughout a Cocaine Bear occasion moderated by THR, director Elizabeth Banks defined that no bears have been current on set; as an alternative, performer Allan Henry performed the bruin earlier than being changed with CGI. She added, “Cokey, as we affectionately referred to as the bear, was conceived of after tons of reference photographs of black bears.”

For Rousselot, who earned a BAFTA nom for The Bear and lensed 2022 Idris Elba automobile Beast with CGI lions, there’s a clear distinction between working with stay animals and never. He says of Bart, “That animal stunk horribly — a really unhealthy mouth hygiene that nobody would have tolerated from an actor.”

This story first appeared within the Feb. 22 concern of The Hollywood Reporter journal. Click on right here to subscribe.