Cocaine Bear teen star earned massive payday for her role in movie

2023 has been a well and truly amazing year for the film industry, as fans were hit by classic after classic.

While the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer may have got all the headlines with their same day release in the summer, there were certainly other gems to be released.

February, which really does feel like a lifetime ago now, saw the release of Cocaine Bear - which was, let's say, an interesting watch.

An official synopsis for the film reads: "An oddball group of cops, criminals, tourists, and teens converge in a Georgia forest where a 500-pound black bear goes on a murderous rampage after unintentionally ingesting cocaine."

Proving truth is often stranger than fiction, director Elizabeth Banks' comedy horror is based on the real-life case of a drug-smuggling plot gone wrong.

At the centre of the bust was Andrew Thornton, a former narcotics officer and lawyer who became the head member of a drug-smuggling ring in Kentucky, known as 'The Company'.

That side of the story alone is enough to be the basis of a film - but things took an even more outrageous turn in 1985.

While on a drugs run from Colombia, Thornton dumped packages of the Class A near Blairsville in Georgia, before jumping from an auto-piloted plane.

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His body was later discovered in the driveway of a residential home in Knoxville, with the Georgia Bureau of Investigations suggesting he may have hit his head on the aircraft tail and failed to open his parachute before plunging to the ground.

When authorities attended the scene, they discovered Thornton to be wearing a bulletproof vest and Gucci loafers.

Universal Pictures

He also had night vision goggles, a wad of cash, knives, two pistols and, let's not forget, a duffel bag filled with millions of dollars' worth of cocaine.

But this wouldn't be the only drugs-stuffed duffel bag in this story.

You see, three months later, after tracking the flightpath of Thornton's plane, officers discovered the now infamous 175-pound black bear dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest.

A number of empty packets were scattered around the animal, and they soon realised it had ingested one of the ten duffel bags containing the contraband.

Teenage star, Brooklynn Prince, who played Dee Dee in Cocaine Bear, earned a whopping $65,000 for her role in the film, according to her minors contract obtained by TMZ.

Araya Doheny/FilmMagic

The 13-year-old could have bagged further bonuses totalling $500,000 based on how well Cocaine Bear did at the worldwide box office.

However, the movie made a total of $89.7 million across the globe, with TMZ reporting bonuses would be awarded to Prince if it made $160 million worldwide.