A few years ago, sticking your buttery fingers into the mouth of Dune sandworm would have been the stuff of a fever dream. Today, it’s just part of the moviegoing experience.
In the past several months, a market for wacky popcorn buckets has taken the movies by storm, creating a new revenue stream—and, perhaps more importantly, source of hype—for theater companies. These “collectible concession vessels” (CCVs), as industry professionals call them, aren’t just regular buckets with images on the side. Rather, they’re designed to get fans to pay up to $50 to eat popcorn out of an unhinged plastic sculpture that’s taken the form of everything from Deadpool’s open mouth to a demon-infested tombstone.
The trend has emerged during an era when movie theaters are still struggling to reach pre-pandemic box office numbers, and when production delays from last summer’s SAG-AFTRA strikes continue to impact new releases. According to data from the global media analytics company Comscore, box office earnings in 2023 (around $9 billion) were the highest since the pandemic, but still fell roughly $2 billion short of pre-pandemic yearly sales. And this year’s numbers are already trailing 2023’s gains. There are several factors driving the stagnation, including the dominance of streaming services, better in-home tech for movie viewing, and a cultural shift in moviegoing habits that came with the pandemic.
Rod Mason is the vice president of business development at Zinc, the design agency behind the infamous Dune: Part Two bucket that captured the internet’s attention and launched collectible buckets into the cultural zeitgeist. He says that the success of the Dune bucket helped to show theaters that going all-on on zany buckets could be one way to make the movies a more enticing destination—and to bump up revenue.
“After the pandemic, the theaters were struggling to get people back into the cinemas and make money,” Mason says. “From an admission perspective, if you pay $20 for a ticket, the cinema only gets to keep 40-50% of that. Where they make their money is on concessions. So there was a much bigger interest from all of the cinemas globally to cash in on these kinds of items.”
And based on conversations that I had with executives at Regal, Cinemark, and AMC, collectible popcorn buckets are not just a passing fad. The theaters say they’re opening up new social media marketing opportunities and a more immersive era of moviegoing. In fact, according to AMC’s vice president of food & beverage product strategy, Nels Storm, the collectible vessel went from a $0 program for the company in 2018 to a $54 million program in 2023. It’s safe to say the popcorn bucket wars are only just beginning.
In the beginning, there was R2-D2
Collectible popcorn buckets burst into the mainstream this spring, when the sandworm-based Dune: Part Two bucket went viral for its supposed similarity to an—ahem—NSFW object (SNL even made a sketch about a teen boy “losing his virginity” to the bucket).
But several major theaters started exploring CCVs years before the Dune frenzy. David Haywood, SVP of food and beverage at Cinemark, says the company tried out a few CCVs in the mid-2010s. And at AMC, the team launched a successful R2-D2 bucket with Zinc in 2019 for the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The droid replica held both a drink beneath his helmet and a spot for popcorn in his middle. At the high price point of $49.99, Storm says it was a “dice roll” for AMC and Disney. The buckets sold out in 48 hours—and they served as “the first indication that there might be something larger there,” Storm says.
AMC had plans to debut a slate of new buckets in 2020. But the pandemic halted in-person viewings, stalling the budding CCV market in its tracks. In 2021, the company dipped its toes back in with a replica of the Ghosbusters Ecto-1 car. “They sold out opening night—we had 30,000 of them and they all disappeared,” Storm says. “People were buying these and running them back to their cars and then coming back in to see the film.”
By 2023, when moviegoing started to creep back to pre-COVID levels, the concept really took off at scale. In March of that year, Cinemark’s Scream VI bucket sold out “almost immediately” in theaters. Both Cinemark and Regal reported major interest in their Barbie-themed buckets, with Cinemark noting customer demand for the merch through December despite the film’s July release.
Unlocking a TikTok-ified new avenue of movie marketing
Part of the CCV’s appeal—to both moviegoers and theater companies—is its exclusivity. The process for creating a new bucket starts months in advance, and it’s usually an active collaboration between the film studio, theater company, manufacturer, and sometimes an additional outside design agency. While the details of these partnerships can look different depending on the project, they always involve plenty of back-and-forth before a final iteration is selected.
Both the studio and the theater company benefit from the additional media attention that these vessels tend to attract. The studio receives a licensing fee from the manufacturer, and the theater company profits because it has the sole rights to sell its specific bucket design.
Cinemark, Regal, and AMC all had their own unique CCVs for the recent release of Deadpool & Wolverine. If a specific one caught your eye, you’d have to see the film at that theater chain (and probably buy some concessions while you’re at it, which are the most profitable source of revenue for most theaters). Because popular buckets frequently sell out, they add a sense of excitement to the in-person experience and attract both collectors and avid fans of the film.
Cinemark CMO Wanda Gierhart Fearing says another selling point for CCVs are their unique marketability on platforms like TikTok. Wacky popcorn buckets have shown real viral potential, and Gierhart Fearing’s marketing team has even taken to teasing new buckets before they’re revealed to drum up extra hype.
“I think [it works because] the audience is Gen Z and millennials,” Gierhart Fearing says. “Because [TikTok] is mostly video-focused, people can do fun things with it, spin it around, and you can see every aspect of it.”
Behind the design of the viral Dune: Part Two popcorn bucket
No bucket showed the power of social media more than the Dune: Part Two vessel. According to Mason and Marcus Gonzalez, Zinc’s creative director, the brainstorming behind the Dune: Part Two bucket started just like any other project. Marcus and Gonzalez have experience designing vessels for theme parks, and had already worked on CCVs for other films including AMC’s R2-D2 replica and a 20-sided die bucket for Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. The first step to designing a bucket people will want to buy, Gonzalez and Mason explain, is choosing an instantly recognizable piece of IP.
With Dune, Gonzalez’s team was actually initially trying to “stay away from the worm;” instead tossing around the idea of using the iconic pain-inducing box or worm-summoning thumpers as popcorn bucket fodder. They were wary of depicting a full-bodied worm in 3D, for obvious reasons—a concern shared by the folks at AMC.
“We knew we wanted to make something that would be immediately recognizable to fans of the Dune universe, but were also cognizant that we had to try to avoid certain visual implications and opted against a full worm design,” says Amber Sheppo, AMC’s VP of consumer products & partnerships.
Ultimately, Gonzalez says, his team “kept going back to the worm.” It was the element of Dune that they felt would resonate with the largest audience, even those who hadn’t read the books or seen the first movie. So, they decided to scrap the full worm concept and just build a popcorn bucket-topper in the shape of the worm’s many-toothed mouth.
Any press is good press?
Zinc presented several prototypes to AMC, who loved the new direction. The finished buckets sat innocuously in offices at both companies for months before the media got a hold of them—at which point, despite steering clear of the dreaded 3D worm, the lewd comments flooded in. According to Gonzalez and Mason, the bucket was not intended to play on shock value at all. If anything, they were the ones shocked by the response.
“Let’s put it this way,” Mason tells me. “When it first hit Reddit, there were some panicked phone calls between Legendary, Zinc, and AMC. It was like, ‘Oh my goodness, what are we going to do here?’ Because, honestly, some of the stuff that came out on social media was pretty gross. But it’s kind of like a wave—you can’t stop a breaking wave.”
Luckily, when the dust had settled, the buzz mostly ended up working as good press for Zinc and AMC.
“Since that time, we have been inundated with requests for popcorn buckets,” Mason says. “[. . .] I think what the cinemas realized back in 2019, especially AMC, was that they could take the theme park experience—where you can only get a Mickey Mouse popcorn bucket at Disneyland—and they want the theater to become a destination for these special collectible items.”
On AMC’s end, it became clear that viewers were more than ready to embrace some daring CCV designs.
“What that also taught us is, maybe we can push the envelope a little bit more and have some more fun—in the right way,” Storm says. “That’s kind of how we’re thinking now. We create the supply and the guests create the demand.”
The next phase of the popcorn bucket wars
That demand doesn’t seem to be waning. If anything, theater companies and studios are pouring more resources into both designing and marketing new CCVs.
For Deadpool & Wolverine, which released in theaters on July 26, AMC designed five different collectible vessels, including a suggestive open-mouthed bucket (an apt choice for the film’s notoriously raunchy vibes). By the following day, all of the units, which numbered in the tens of thousands, had sold out. Storm says he heard “multiple stories of folks waiting in their cars for our doors to open so they can come in and buy the CCVs.” At Cinemark, CCV sales during Deadpool & Wolverine’s opening weekend contributed to the company’s highest concession revenue since the pandemic. Regal, too, reported “remarkable success” with its Deadpool & Wolverine CCV, which featured a baby Deadpool sucking on a binky and sitting in a theater chair.
And there are more buckets to come this summer. The internet is currently obsessing over Regal’s recently announced Beetlejuice Beetlejuice buckets, which include a tombstone, a spiraling sandworm, and a copy of the “Handbook for the Recently Deceased.” Regal, Cinemark, and AMC will also all sell their own takes on the monsters from Alien: Romulus. X users are already praising the Cinemark bucket for its design: “The sculpt is fantastic, the paint pretty swell, and the size is incredible!” one user wrote.
As the CCV market continues to grow, a subindustry of bucket resellers has emerged. The original R2-D2 bucket is going for around $100 on eBay, and the Dune bucket is outpacing it at as much as $140. As Mason theorized, theater CCVs seem to be matching—and, in some cases, surpassing—the caliber of exclusive merch that people are typically willing to pay a premium for in theme parks. These buckets are now a part of the movie-going experience, and theaters are vying to outdo each other on every major film release. We haven’t seen the end of weird popcorn buckets just yet—and they’re probably only getting weirder from here.
“There’s been an evolution over the past two or three years, and I think that evolution is going to continue with more tech involved in some of these items,” Mason says. “There is a real appetite for items that are special and that the fans will love. [. . .] The sky is the limit.”