The “cocaine bear” and the dangers of the classic copycat cult

The reason for this is actually quite simple: cult films are not meant to be sold to you as such. Cult films should be discovered. This has been the case for decades and decades of hardcore cinephiles. There’s no better feeling than finding an outlandish low-budget horror movie or a chaotic obscure Asian action movie and happily showing it to a friend. And then this friend shows it to another friend. And eventually, the web disappears until a true cult classic is born, sometimes years after the original film’s release. Trying to reconstruct this sacred ritual is an extremely risky undertaking. Just ask New Line Cinema and the people who worked on the 2006 film. snakes on the planeperhaps the most recent notable example of a film pre-packaged as a cult favourite.

‘Snakes on a Plane’ proves that it’s hard to reconstruct cult classics

With an absurd premise, a campy title that screamed “B-movie fun”, and a star… Samuel L. Jacksonin this case, ready to chew on all the decorations that he could eat, snakes on the plane received high-profile publicity as a film “so bad it’s even good that you just have to watch it to believe it” even before it was released. The increasingly online cinephile community giggled at trailers and joked about the movie online — Twitter had just debuted this year — which only fed the marketing beast. The studio pursued the online chatter, even ordering reshoots to raise the film from PG-13 to R and add Jackson’s infamous line, “I had it with those fucking kites on that fucking plane!” a line of dialogue that originated from a fake trailer widely circulated on the Internet. snakes on the plane was supposed to be the next big midnight movie… until, quite unexpectedly, it wasn’t. The film generated lukewarm reviews and public disinterest. It grossed $15 million domestically on its opening weekend, below expectations, and eventually hit a meek $62 million worldwide. Ultimately, box office performance doesn’t necessarily matter much when it comes to a film’s status as a “cult classic,” but a true cult film should live on by its enduring appeal. Unfortunately for snakes on the planeno one actually talks about it today in any capacity other than as a weird Hollywood footnote.

Several arguments can be made here as to why this outage occurred. Perhaps, especially in 2006, online enthusiasm did not necessarily lead to popular enthusiasm. You can also point out that cult films made to stand the test of time must be either good or at least fun to watch… and that snakes on the plane it was neither one nor the other. But I also think it’s fair to say that the studio’s cries of “THIS MOVIE IS YOUR NEXT BIG BEAUTIFUL PLEASURE” is not the best way to make it a reality. Nobody wants to be told how to think, and again, that sense of discovery has always been crucial to the “cult classic” mystique. What’s left to know about snakes on the plane when was his most famous line of dialogue created by the internet before it became part of the movie?

Outrageous B-Movies Work Best When Surprise Is Saved

This leads to another good point about successful cult films: it’s best not to know too much about what they’re about to release. Let’s take, for example, Malignant - James WangA 2021 gonzo horror movie that may not have made a splash at the box office, but has amassed an increasingly frenzied (and still growing) fan base. Lee Malignant will remain a classic for years to come, but the main reason it made such a buzz in the horror community is because no one delved into it knowing what to expect. Even the film itself pretty much starts out as a traditional ghost story, not unlike some of Wang’s other horror films such as spellbefore it wildly (and gloriously) folds into something completely different. Horror fans are always trying to keep the surprise in movies like Malignant (or Barbarian or any other movie with big disclosures in the second and third act). “Don’t read anything about it, just go and see” is a common refrain on the Internet when word of mouth spreads.

However, that’s hard to do when the studio itself can’t help but blab, trying to market the film as the next big cult film. Let’s take for example M3GANsoon-to-be-released horror film produced by Wang and heavily based on Malignant creative team. M3GAN hopes to capitalize on the win-win, over-the-top plot that also led Malignant. But then how Malignant kept his cards close to his vest, allowing viewers to discover the madness within, M3GAN heavily advertises the antics of his squirrel-cage killer android, filling its trailers with instant-meme images of a robot doll doing some iconic machete-wielding dance moves. Malignant wouldn’t have worked as well if his most crowd-pleasing scenes had been teased beforehand. Does M3GAN Are there big surprises in store, or has too much been given away in trailers, ultimately limiting its word of mouth cult appeal?

Will Cocaine Bear become a cult classic?

Almost every word of caution I have recommended in this article can be applied to Cocaine BeaR. It has such an overly campy title that pretty much screams its intentions. It has a story - extremely loosely based on the true story of a bear who was found dead after overdosing on cocaine thrown from an airplane - that sounds like a B-movie. And it has a trailer that apparently reveals a number of funny moments that might have blown the roof off the cinema if the audience didn’t already know they were coming. This includes both dialogue (“There was a bear. He was fucked!”) And moments of joyful wanton violence. (While there may be some misdirection by my calculations, the trailer spoiled up to five of the murders committed at the hands of the so-called cocaine bear in this film.) There is no doubt that this film was designed, engineered and promoted to be a cult hit that fans will be reviewed and reviewed for years to come. Maybe it will! But you know what they say about the most elaborate plans. And when it comes to creating a film that can both impress at the box office and bring long-term appeal to a B-rated cult classic, planning ahead for such results has proven to be very tricky.