Sugar23 has signed rising star Brooklynn Prince, on the heels of her new film Cocaine Bear‘s opening weekend triumph, with a current worldwide gross of $28M+ at the worldwide box office, against a production budget of roughly $30M.

The R-rated horror-comedy directed for Universal by Elizabeth Banks has broken out as one of the early success stories of 2023, affirming that original features, and those in the comedy arena, can certainly still perform in today’s marketplace. Based loosely on real events that took place in 1985, the film watches as a duffel bag’s worth of cocaine drops from a drug smuggler’s plane and winds up in a Georgia forest, becoming a favorite snack for a hulking black bear. An electric set of unfortunate souls, including Prince, Keri Russell and Christian Convery, are then subject to the animal’s murderous rampage.

Prince was best known, prior to this weekend, for her breakout performance in Sean Baker’s A24 drama The Florida Project, demonstrating her ability to hold her own against the likes of Willem Dafoe. The then-six-year-old actress carried the feature, centered on the summertime adventures of a girl growing up on the premises of a budget hotel in Florida with her unemployed single mother (Bria Vinaite), and was rewarded with her efforts with a Critics’ Choice Award for Best Young Performer in 2018.

Prince has also drawn acclaim for her lead performance in the Apple TV+ mystery series Home Before Dark, created by Dana Fox and Dara Resnik. She previously starred in Lord and Miller’s The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part and voiced roles in The Angry Birds Movie 2, as well as Disney’s The One and Only Ivan, alongside Angelina Jolie. Additional feature credits for the actress include the sci-fi thriller Settlers with Sofia Boutella and Jonny Lee Miller, as well as the Uni gothic horror The Turning opposite Mackenzie Davis and Finn Wolfhard.

Up next for the actress is the thriller The Marsh King’s Daughter, based on the novel by Karen Dionne, which has her starring opposite Ben Mendelsohn and Daisy Ridley. The film directed by Neil Burger (The Upside) is currently in post-production. Prince continues to be represented by UTA and Hansen, Jacobson, Teller.

Sugar23 is the production and management company founded in 2017 by Oscar-winning producer, manager and entrepreneur Michael Sugar, who has shepherded such award-winning projects as Spotlight, The Knick, The OA, Maniac, 13 Reasons Why and I Am the Night. Recent projects from the company include the Peabody Award-winning Apple TV+ series Dickinson led by Hailee Steinfeld and Steven Soderbergh’s starry Netflix feature, The Laundromat. Sugar23 currently boasts both a first-look film deal and an overall television deal with Netflix.

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