The Movie Release of the Summer Is an $80 Popcorn Bucket

BY BEN FRITZ

Theaters battle for concessions supremacy by rolling out obscenely expensive containers

A superhero’s open mouth. A wearable baby carrier. A vampire’s sarcophagus.

Moviegoers are putting their hands in weird places to get their popcorn.

If you’ve been to a theater in the past year, you’ve noticed your favorite snack doesn’t just come in disposable bags anymore. Most films now get a specially designed and shockingly expensive receptacle that holds popcorn and can then be displayed on a shelf at home. There’s a Daily Planet newspaper box for “Superman,” a vault opened by a special key for the latest “Mission: Impossible,” and a breakable

board bucket top for “Karate Kid: Legends” Each one typically costs between $25 and $50, though one tied to the next Marvel movie will push the limit to $80. The competition to stand out from the crowd is intense. Major chains now regularly sell their own exclusive popcorn buckets for the same film. For this week’s “Jurassic World: Rebirth,” Cinemark is offering a tyrannosaurus rex head, Regal has a dinosaur embryo incubator, and AMC audiences can eat their popcorn out of a T-Rex’s footprint.

Who’s responsible for this madness? The credit–or blame–goes to “Dune.”

Sturdy metal snack containers with unique art have long been a mainstay of theaters and theme parks. “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in 2019 ushered in the current trend of designing an entirely new container to celebrate a film with an R2-D2 popcorn holder. But it wasn’t until last year’s release of “Dune: Part Two” that the gimmick became a full-blown phenomenon.

Designed to resemble the mouth of a giant sandworm from the film, AMC’s container was so sexually suggestive that it became a viral sensation. It immediately sold out and even spawned a “Saturday Night Live” skit about a teenager using the bucket to lose his virginity.

Sexual innuendo “was definitely not the intent,” said Marcus Gonzalez, creative director at Zinc Group, which designs many of the best known collectible popcorn buckets including the infamous “Dune” one. “The worm’s the worm’s the worm.”

Proving the old maxim that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity,” “Dune” sparked a surge of interest in Zinc’s design work. “Now everybody wants to do a popcorn bucket and everyone wants to make it into something that will be iconic,” said Rod Mason, vice president of business development.

When Ryan Reynolds unveiled a popcorn container for “Deadpool & Wolverine” on social media soon after “Dune: Part Two,” he wrote, “Years from now they will look back at 2024 as the year the War of the Popcorn Buckets began.”

Zinc licenses the rights to make collectibles from the studios behind upcoming films and then works with theater clients that order them. Sometimes the inspirations are obvious, said Gonzalez, like a racing helmet for “F1.” Other films don’t obviously translate to a snack container and require more brainstorming.

For last year’s “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” the popcorn bucket’s lid hid a special keychain based on a symbol from the franchise. The “Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves” popcorn bucket was a giant 20-sided die, which doesn’t appear in the movie but is an iconic part of the game on which it’s based.

Theater chains typically order between 20,000 and 100,000 of each collectible popcorn bucket, but predicting their popularity can be tough. Designs that click with audiences and are connected to hit films sell out fast and then go on eBay for hundreds of dollars, like the “Nosferatu” sarcophagus. When they’re tied to a movie that flops, such as a dynamite detonator for last year’s “Borderlands,” theaters end up unloading them online at a discount. Collectors rush to see movies as soon as they open to get their hands on the hottest new popcorn containers. Brandon Blevins went to the second showing of “Lilo & Stitch” near his small town in West Virginia on the Thursday the movie came out, but he was too late. The theater had already sold out of all the buckets, including Stitch holding popcorn in a pineapple and in a coconut.

“The same thing happened with ‘Minecraft,’ but luckily I got there for the very first showing,” said the 22-year-old, who has 18 popcorn buckets in his collection.

At a time when box office sales still haven’t recovered to pre-pandemic levels, plastic popcorn buckets with hefty profit margins may be the best news theaters have gotten in years. “It’s very accretive and complementary to what we’re doing at the box office and concession sales,” said John Curry, senior vice president of commercial at Regal. Exclusives, he noted, “encourage people to watch movies at Regal.”

Designers start working a year and a half in advance, meaning there may already be prototype popcorn buckets for early 2027 releases like “Sonic the Hedgehog 4” and “Godzilla x Kong: Supernova.”

Some even integrate electronics. A bucket for last year’s hit “Wicked” lit up pink on one side with an image of the princess Glinda and green on the other for Elphaba.

Blevins is a particular fan of popcorn buckets that are also helmets he can wear, like ones for “Thunderbolts” and “Gladiator II.”

The aspiring film critic runs communities on Reddit and Discord that track every upcoming collectible popcorn bucket release. Excitement is sky-high, he said, for one tied to this month’s Marvel Studios film “The Fantastic Four: First Steps.” The replica of villain Galactus’s head is “BIG–like really BIG” according to Regal, which will be selling the collectible for $79.95. It features glowing LED eyes and removable purple horns and holds 361 ounces of popcorn – more than twice the size of a typical large popcorn.

“I am going to be outside my theater waiting for the doors to unlock for this one,” said Blevins.