MTV Movie & TV Awards Best Villain: Cokey takes on M3GAN in Universal monsterverse showdown
The stars of Universal’s unofficial new-era monsterverse are facing off for Best Villain at the MTV Movie & TV Awards on May 7, giving this generation the next best thing to its very own “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.”
“M3GAN” came out in January and became 2023’s first bona fide success. The campy sci-fi slasher about a bereaved young girl’s high-tech doll becoming a killer robot scored $177 million against a $12-million budget. Universal followed the sleeper hit with February’s “Cocaine Bear,” in which a zany cast of characters must survive a 500-pound black bear that’s ingested a missing stash of narcotics. It earned the studio an additional $87 million but fell short of expectations. What will Cokey’s response to M3G’s upstaging of her be?
Though she is hibernating down in fourth place, a bump or two is all this mama bear needs to get back in the fight. Cokey’s currently tied with Harry Styles, but the “Don’t Worry Darling” star will need a stronger lullaby than “With You All the Time” to knock this one out. As for the crossover showdown we all want to see between Universal’s new horror staples, Cokey has size. However, M3G’s got a supercomputer brain, not to mention some brute strength of her own.
The two are at opposite ends of the race. Perhaps the insufficient support for Cokey despite the film’s overall strong Rotten Tomatoes audience score and performance at the box office is owed to her lack of human representation (the only comparable example is “Jurassic Park’s” T. rex from 1994). Whereas a vote for “M3GAN,” the overwhelming favorite at this point, has a beneficiary (two, in fact) – Jenna Davis and Amie Donald, who provided the character’s voice and movements, respectively – there’s no face to go with a “Cocaine Bear” win. Or is there?
The comedic thriller’s eponymous beast was engineered through a combination of VFX and physical acting. Trained by motion-capture legend Andy Serkis (“The Lord of the Rings,” “King Kong,” “The Planet of the Apes”), “Cocaine Bear’s” unsung lead, stuntman Allan Henry, learned to move as a quadruped while wearing a prosthetic head and meter-long extensions for his arms and legs. Though he wasn’t covered with tracking markers, Henry did provide “a crucial reference point to create Cokey’s eyeline, physicality, and emotional state,” which assisted both the actors on set and the animation team at Wētā FX.
Besides M3GAN and Styles, this cocaine-loving bear will need to overcome “Doctor Strange’s” Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen) and “Stranger Things’” Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower). In 2022, Daniel Radcliffe (“The Lost City”) beat heavyhitters like Colin Farrell (“The Batman”) and Willem Dafoe (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”). Can Cokey reduce her home-turf rival to scrapyard metal and pull off a similar upset?
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