The Crazy World of POPCORN BUCKETS

46 minutes ago

9 min read

Popcorn and movies. They just go together.

They have gone together for so long that I honestly can't imagine walking into a movie theater and not immediately smelling popcorn. You can have your Raisinets, your Milk Duds, your nachos with that suspicious orange cheese that probably has a half-life of 700 years, whatever you want.

For me, popcorn is the movie food. It is part of the ritual. You walk into the lobby, you smell it, you spend an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on it, and ten minutes later you're sitting in the dark wondering how you already ate half of it before the movie even started.

Popcorn actually became an essential part of the moviegoing experience during the Great Depression. It was cheap, portable and smelled fantastic, and theaters eventually figured out that selling the stuff was an enormously profitable business.

Before that, theater owners weren't necessarily crazy about people bringing messy food into their nice auditoriums. Then the Depression hit, money became tight, and suddenly those little kernels of corn started looking pretty damn good. Eventually popcorn became inseparable from the movies, surviving television, home video, streaming and every other supposed threat to theatrical exhibition.

For most of that history, however, the container wasn't particularly exciting. You got popcorn in a bag, a cardboard box or eventually one of those big round cardboard tubs.

Maybe there was a movie logo printed on it. Maybe there was some colorful artwork. If you were lucky, Batman was on the side.

Then somebody apparently looked at that perfectly functional cardboard tub and thought: This isn't nearly complicated enough.

And here we are.

Over the last several years, the simple popcorn bucket has mutated into something else entirely. The movie-theater industry even has an official name for these things: “collectible concession vessels,” which is possibly the most hilariously corporate term imaginable for a plastic Godzilla head filled with buttered popcorn.

These aren't buckets anymore. They're toys. They're statues. They're pieces of movie memorabilia. They're elaborate plastic sculptures with lights and moving parts. Some of them are wearable. Some of them are enormous. Some of them cost more than the movie ticket, the popcorn, the drink, the parking and probably dinner afterward combined.

And people absolutely love them.

Disney had already spent years turning collectible popcorn pails into a major part of its theme-park merchandise business, and movie theaters had occasionally sold souvenir tins and plastic containers connected to particular films.

But the modern movie-theater version of this phenomenon really started taking shape in 2019 when AMC released a detailed R2-D2 popcorn container for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The thing cost around $50, which apparently made some people inside the company nervous. Would moviegoers really pay 50 bucks for a plastic droid to hold their popcorn?

Oh, yes. Yes, they would.

The R2-D2 containers sold out on opening night, and AMC realized there was a real business here. Then, of course, 2020 happened, movie theaters shut down, and the whole experiment was temporarily interrupted.

AMC got back into the business with Ghostbusters: Afterlife in 2021, including a Ghost Trap container, and the novelty vessels gradually started appearing more frequently as audiences returned to theaters.

Then came 2023 and 2024, and things got nuts.

Barbie had a bright pink Corvette popcorn container. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had an Ant-Man helmet you could fill with popcorn. Taylor Swift's The Eras Tour turned souvenir concession merchandise into an event unto itself, with fans lining up for tins and cups and immediately putting them on the secondary market.

Theater chains began realizing that there was an audience willing to show up early, stand in line and spend serious money on movie merchandise that could only be purchased in connection with the theatrical experience.

And then the sandworm arrived.

If there is one object that transformed the modern popcorn-bucket craze from a cute little movie-theater merchandising trend into an honest-to-God pop-culture phenomenon, it is the Dune: Part Two sandworm bucket.

You know the one.

Designed to resemble one of the gigantic sandworms of Arrakis, the bucket had a round opening surrounded by rows of flexible teeth. The idea was that you reached through the sandworm's mouth to get your popcorn. Perfectly innocent. Except the moment pictures appeared online, everyone looked at this thing and immediately thought exactly the same thing.

It looked incredibly sexual.

There was no getting around it. Suddenly people weren't discussing Dune: Part Two. They were discussing what exactly somebody might be tempted to do with the Dune: Part Two popcorn bucket.

The thing went viral before the movie even opened. Social media went insane. Late-night shows made jokes about it. The cast of Dune was being asked about it during interviews. Denis Villeneuve was being asked about the damn popcorn bucket.

And then Saturday Night Live took it to its logical conclusion.

Marcello Hernández and host Ayo Edebiri starred in an absolutely hilarious musical sketch in which teenagers sing romantically about losing their virginity to the Dune popcorn bucket.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl_Xhvgkxrk&list=RDRl_Xhvgkxrk&start_radio=1

The entire joke was based on the thing everybody had already been thinking from the first moment they saw that sandworm opening. It was filthy, ridiculous and very funny, and at that point the bucket wasn't just merchandise anymore. It was part of the culture. That changed everything.

Suddenly the question wasn't simply, “Can we make a popcorn bucket for this movie?” The question became, “How crazy can we make the popcorn bucket for this movie?”

Ryan Reynolds understood this immediately. When Deadpool & Wolverine came along a few months later, Reynolds unveiled a Wolverine bucket in which you had to reach directly into Wolverine's enormous open mouth to get your popcorn.

The promotional video was deliberately suggestive because by then everybody was in on the joke. Reynolds actually announced that 2024 would be remembered as the beginning of the “War of the Popcorn Buckets.” He wasn't wrong.

Now virtually every major theater chain has gotten involved. AMC has its exclusives. Regal has its exclusives. Cinemark has its exclusives. Marcus has its versions. One movie can have several completely different collectible containers depending on where you see it.

There are online stores selling the things after the theatrical run, and there is an entire secondary market where sold-out buckets are immediately flipped by collectors and resellers. And there is serious money involved.

This was basically a nonexistent business for AMC in 2018. By 2023, the chain was reporting approximately $54 million in merchandise sales, driven largely by these collectible concession vessels and related movie merchandise.

The business has continued growing: AMC has said it expects global collectible merchandise revenue to pass $100 million, while Cinemark has reported merchandise growth of 40 percent from 2024 to 2025. This isn't somebody at the concession stand saying, “Hey, let's put Shrek on a bucket.” This has become an actual industry.

The design process itself is kind of fascinating. Companies such as Zinc Group work with studios and theater chains as much as 12 to 14 months before a movie comes out. They receive artwork and digital assets from the studio, brainstorm designs and then have to figure out how to manufacture these ridiculous things so they actually function. Because underneath everything else, theoretically, you're still supposed to put popcorn in them.

They have to use appropriate materials. They have to survive grease and butter. They have to be shipped without breaking. And, perhaps most importantly, there has to be an opening large enough for a human being to stick a hand inside.

The fact that somebody now has a professional job determining whether your hand can successfully enter Galactus's skull to retrieve popcorn makes me very happy.

And Galactus may represent the point where this entire thing reached glorious insanity. For 2025's The Fantastic Four: First Steps, theaters sold a massive Galactus head with light-up eyes. It holds 361 ounces. It is 20 inches wide with the horns attached and 17½ inches tall.

It retailed for about $80. Eighty dollars. For a popcorn bucket. At that point you aren't buying a popcorn bucket anymore. You're buying furniture.

And here's where I have mixed feelings about the whole phenomenon, because on one level I think it's absolutely hilarious. I love the creativity. I love looking at these things. I love the fact that designers are apparently sitting around conference tables trying to figure out increasingly deranged objects from which human beings can consume popcorn.

There is something charmingly silly about it, and anything that makes going to the movies feel like an event again (especially after everything theatrical exhibition has been through) is something I can appreciate.

But I also look at some of these prices and think: Are you kidding me?

Going to the movies is already expensive. The concessions are ridiculously expensive. You buy two tickets, a giant popcorn and a couple of drinks and suddenly you're wondering whether you should have applied for financing before entering the theater.

Now you're supposed to throw another $40, $50, $60 or $80 onto the bill because your popcorn is being served inside the head of a Marvel character? And what do you do with the thing afterward?

Do people actually eat popcorn out of these things? Do you wash your Wolverine head when you get home? Do you bring Galactus back to the theater three weeks later and say, “Fill him up”? Do you walk into an AMC carrying R2-D2 under your arm?

I'm guessing that for a lot of people the popcorn is almost beside the point. These are collectibles. You buy them, take them home and put them on a shelf alongside the rest of your movie memorabilia. And I completely understand that because I collect movie stuff, too. I'm certainly not going to sit here pretending I'm above any of this.

My favorite movie of all time is Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia, and I own an actual certified frog used in the movie. If you've seen Magnolia, you know exactly what I'm talking about. At the end of the film, frogs literally rain from the sky, and I have one of those frogs.

It sits on display in my apartment. I will even include a picture of it here as proof.

So I understand collecting strange movie objects.

But my frog was actually in Magnolia. That's my defense.

These popcorn buckets are mass-produced plastic objects, and people are still treating them like precious artifacts. And you know what? If you love Barbie and have a whole Barbie collection, of course that pink Corvette bucket is going on the shelf.

If you're a Marvel obsessive, you probably have enough superhero popcorn containers by now to open your own concession stand. If you're a Ghostbusters fan, that Ghost Trap is essentially another prop replica. I get it.

What amazes me is how quickly the popcorn bucket itself has become part of the marketing of the movie. We're now at the point where a new blockbuster can generate two completely separate conversations: “Did you see the trailer?” and “Did you see the bucket?”

And they keep getting stranger. Cinemark is selling a giant mud-textured Clayface hand for the 2026 Clayface. The Godzilla Minus Zero promotion has produced a monster container that stands nearly 20 inches tall and costs around $90.

There are buckets that light up. Buckets you wear. Buckets shaped like cars, helmets, monsters, books, spaceships and body parts. At this point I'm waiting for somebody to release a popcorn bucket that requires its own seat and a separate movie ticket.

Actually, don't laugh. We're probably six months away.

That is what makes this whole thing so much fun to look at. The buckets have become a weird little art form unto themselves, and the designers are clearly trying to top one another.

Practicality is no longer the goal. Nobody is asking, “What's the easiest possible container from which to eat popcorn?” They are asking, “How can we make eating popcorn as complicated and ridiculous as humanly possible?”

So I went digging through the increasingly bizarre history of the modern collectible concession vessel (and yes, I still can't say that phrase without laughing) to find the designs that made me stop and think, “Somebody actually approved this.”

Some are cool. Some are beautiful. Some are incredibly stupid. Some are ingenious. Some are vaguely obscene. Some are so enormous that calling them “buckets” seems like an insult to the English language. And some make me want to meet the person who designed them just so I can ask a few questions.

I have narrowed them down to my favorites.

Grab your overpriced popcorn (whether it comes in a normal cardboard tub or the hollowed-out head of a 20-inch cosmic supervillain) and enjoy.