Never bet against the bear. Cocaine Bear, Elizabeth Banks’ R-rated creature feature, snorted up an impressive $23.1 million in its opening weekend, blowing past projections to land in second place on the domestic charts. At weekend’s close, it ranked behind only Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which—much like the real-life ursid that inspired Cocaine Bear—immediately dropped dead. The third Ant-Man feature, hampered at the starting gate by a tepid critical reception, fell 69.7 percent in its second weekend, running off the fumes of its $106-million opening to collect a meager $32.2 million in ticket sales. The week-to-week drop is the largest in Marvel’s cinematic history, with Black Widow, a dual-release product of the pandemic, hot on its heels at 67 percent. It also marks the largest second-weekend plunge of any caped-crusader flick opening to $100 million or more since 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
