THERE’S A PHRASE famous among screenwriters, “Save the cat” — referring to a moment early on in a movie when a character is kind to an animal, to signal to the audience that they’re a nice person. “‘Drug the bear’ is its crazy-fun, very violent cousin,” laughs Jimmy Warden, the writer behind buzzy upcoming comedy-thriller Cocaine Bear. Directed by Elizabeth Banks, the film was inspired by a post Warden spotted on Twitter in 2019: a screengrab of an article about a real-life bear who, in the mid-1980s, consumed a package of drugs, discarded in the woods during a botched drug heist. “The caption was something like: ‘This bear must have been the most dangerous apex predator on Earth,’” Warden recalls. “And I just thought, ‘How do you not make that a movie?!’”